Hooray for Iowa!

[inbhirnis]

Their Supreme Court just ruled in favor of same sex marriage.

Now - I wonder if Iowa is also hampered by a political system where a popular vote of 50%+1 vote can strip these newly won rights away?

Comments

[bear-left.livejournal.com]

I gather it's much harder to repeal than in CA - what I think I saw was a repeal would have to pass the state legislature in two consecutive sessions & then go to a referendum (which means 2012 at the earliest).

[inbhirnis.livejournal.com]

Ah - a slightly more sane method than here. Of course, the issue of whether our state legislature should have had the opportunity to speak on Prop 8, rather than it going straight to a popular vote ('Revision' vs. 'Amendment') is precisely the issue before our Supreme Court. And that argument is, in all likelihood, going to go down in flames.

[urbear]

That's very similar to MA's amendment process. We have that to thank for the state of gay marriage in MA today... the amendment process is slow and requires a great deal of support in the legislature. It never got as far as a referendum, and even if it had, it would have been long enough after the start of gay marriage that most of the shock would have died down.

I don't get CA's rules. A constitution should not be that easy to change.

[furrbear.livejournal.com]

Yeah, CA's Constitution will start to look like TX's; but for a different reason - In TX, damn near any and everything takes a Constitutional Amendment.

[inbhirnis.livejournal.com]

It's ridiculous here - it takes 2/3 to approve a tax increase, but it only takes 50%+1 to take someone's rights away...

[inbhirnis.livejournal.com]

The Obama Administration's response (http://www.pamshouseblend.com/diary/10230/breaking-white-house-response-to-iowa-ruling) is not very bold at all - 'crap' is the word that comes to mind.

[bear-left.livejournal.com]

Even the later clarification was pretty underwhelming.

[joebehrsandiego.livejournal.com]

I ganked this (and Ian's perspective) for LJ and Facebook. Thank you both!

[tilia-tomentosa.livejournal.com]

Yay for Iowa! :)

But I don't understand the complexities of your legislative system at all.

[inbhirnis.livejournal.com]

Deciding things like this by popular vote is ridiculous - but that's the system we have here in CA. Hopefully, the 'Proposition' process will be reformed one day to make it a lot more difficult.

[tilia-tomentosa.livejournal.com]

[Bad username or site: @ livejournal.com] already more or less explained your system to me.

The problem here in Bulgaria is just the opposite - our Constitution defines marriage as "a voluntary union between a man and a woman", and a change to the constitution involves a complicated time-consuming procedure and a 3/4 majority in Parliament three times on different days. So the struggle now is for the civil union type of thing to be introduced into the next version of the Family Code.

[estudioso.livejournal.com]

That's fantastic news, roy. Go Iowa!

[fba.livejournal.com]

Iowa's approach seems very sensible and isn't the fudge we have in the UK (while it is better than nothing civil partnership is a fudge in some very important ways). Marriage itself is a legal contract between two people, if they want to have it solomised by a religion then that is between them and their priest...

[inbhirnis.livejournal.com]

It's always been my belief that in a few years, people in the UK will say "why do we have two names for two identical statuses? Let's just call them both 'marriage'".

[fba.livejournal.com]

I know a good number of breeders that don't want to get married (I suspect they are being too right on for their own good tbh) that moan that only gay people can have a civil partnership. There are also people that claim that elderly same gender siblings that live together should be able to have civil partnerships (yet they'd probably die frothing at the mouth if a brother and sister wanted to get married!). Marriage is such a loaded word - which is very very difficult to separate the legal sense from the religious sense.

If I had my way everyone would only be able to have a civil marriage and churches would only be able to perform blessing ceremonies and they would be free to pick and choose who they wanted to offer them to.

[shirtlifterbear.livejournal.com]

Did you see the Gay Iowan State Senator's take on it?

http://www.towleroad.com/2009/04/openly-gay-iowa-state-senator-matt-mccoy-iowa-will-not-go-back-1.html