Best Analysis of IOWA Marriage Decision

Art Leonard over at Leonard Link and for New York City's Gay City News analyzes the Iowa Marriage case in a brilliant (if not concise!) fashion:

This is the first time that a state supreme court has unanimously concluded that same-sex couples have an equal right with different-sex couples to marry as a matter of state constitutional law. Prior same-sex marriage victories have all come from closely divided courts, as have the defeats.

Since the Polk County Recorder was the defendant in this case, it was that county's attorney, not the Iowa attorney general, who argued the state's position.

The beautifully and clearly written opinion by Justice Mark Cady stands as a strong rebuke to the bizarre plurality opinion produced by Judge Robert Smith of the New York Court of Appeals in the 2006 ruling in Hernandez v. Robles, which rejected the right of same-sex couples to marry here.

Cady's opinion also built on the important 2008 opinions from California Chief Justice Ronald George and Connecticut Justice Richard N. Palmer. Cady cited and quoted from George and Palmer, but made many important contributions in helping to explain why the court reached its decision.

The court decided to treat this as an equal protection case concerning a statute that discriminates based on sexual orientation. The plaintiffs had challenged on both gender and sexual orientation discrimination grounds, and the trial judge had seen this as a gender discrimination case, but the court decided to cut through the semantics and get to the heart of the matter: the challenged law, enacted as part of the surge in state so-called Defense of Marriage Acts during the 1990s, was intended to exclude gay people from marrying.

Cady opened his opinion with a brief civics lesson on the three branches of government fundamental to American constitutional law and the role of the courts in dealing with claims that statutes are unconstitutional. He reviewed highlights of Iowa equal protection precedents, including rulings recognizing the equality rights of black people more than two decades before the Civil War, an 1873 decision questioning the constitutionality of racial segregation -- more than 80 years before the US Supreme Court came to that point in Brown v. Board of Education -- and Iowa's distinction as the first state in the nation to strike down the exclusion of women from the legal profession, in 1869.

Getting to the nub of the marriage equality question, he wrote, "This issue comes to us with the same importance as our landmark cases of the past. The same-sex-marriage debate waged in this case is part of a strong national dialogue centered on a fundamental, deep-seated, traditional institution that has excluded, by state action, a particular class of Iowans. This class of people asks a simple and direct question: How can a state premised on the constitutional principle of equal protection justify exclusion of a class of Iowans from civil marriage?"

[...]

This reasoning is a direct rejection of the methodology used by state courts that have embraced the "channeling procreation" theory as a justification for providing marriage only to different-sex couples -- especially the absurd contention by New York Court of Appeals Judge Robert Smith that because same-sex couples can only have children through "intentional actions" (such as donor insemination, surrogacy, or adoption), there is no need to dangle the benefits of marriage in front of them in order to "channel" their procreative activities. Different-sex couples, in contrast, according to Smith's argument, often bear children with no planning, and so need to be steered toward a stable family structure.

Given the Iowa court's framing of the issue, Polk County's case collapsed like a house of cards, since none of the justifications it offered could possibly meet the test of substantially advancing a legitimate governmental objective. Cady quickly demolished the county's argument that maintaining or preserving traditional marriage could qualify as the necessary justification.

"A specific tradition sought to be maintained cannot be an important governmental objective for equal protection purposes," he wrote, "when the tradition is nothing more than the historical classification currently expressed in the statute being challenged. When a certain tradition is used as both the governmental objective and the classification to further that objective, the equal protection analysis is transformed into the circular question of whether the classification accomplishes the governmental objective, which objective is to maintain the classification."

[...]

Iowa's court was not ready to embrace the halfway measures suggested by the New Jersey and Vermont Supreme Courts, which led to the enactment of civil union laws in those states.

"A new distinction based on sexual orientation," Cody wrote, "would be equally suspect and difficult to square with the fundamental principles of equal protection embodied in our constitution."

Accordingly, the portion of the Iowa Code "limiting civil marriage to a man and a woman must be stricken from the statute, and the remaining statutory language must be interpreted and applied in a manner allowing gay and lesbian people full access to the institution of civil marriage."

This is just an excerpt. You should really do yourself a favor and read the whole thing yourself.