This morning, gay people got married in Iowa. The Des Moines Register has all the details here:
Melisa Keeton and Shelley Wolfe were the first same-sex couple with a license in hand at the Polk County administration building, and Judge Karen Romano granted the Des Moines couple a waiver to the standard three-day waiting period.
Wolfe and Keeton exchanged vows outside the Polk County administration building shortly before 10 a.m., surrounded by friends, relatives and news crews.
The ceremony makes Wolfe and Keeton the second same-sex couple to marry in Polk County, but the first to wed after the landmark supreme-court decision. The first couple was Iowa State University students Tim McQuillan and Sean Fritz.
Wee Mama has a diary with videos and more links here!
Huge congratulations to all the newlyweds!
You can see the Register's photo gallery from this morning here I'd embed if I could, but I don't think I can. Here is one photo - this is the exact same counter where clonecone and I filled out OUR marriage application just a little over a month ago, and where we picked up the license after our three day waiting period. Three days seemed like a VERY long time to wait, but at least now we know that gay couples won't have to wait MORE than those three days.
One Iowa is running a great ad - which I've actually seen on TV - unlike the "storm" ad. Here it is:
I was reading the NYT this weekend and came across a good article on Iowa and gay marriage,
Same-Sex Ruling Belies the Staid Image of Iowa. I wanted to pull a few paragraphs from this article because as I was reading, I thought to myself - THIS is why gay marriage will stay legal in Iowa:
"To be honest, I would rather not have it in Iowa," said Shirley Cox, who has spent most of her 84 years in this old railroad town. Ms. Cox said she had always been proud to tell people what state she was from, but now was not so sure.
"But the thing is," she went on, "it’s really none of my business. Who am I to tell someone how to live? I live the way I want, and they should live the way they want. I’m surely not going to stomp and raise heck and campaign against it."
This reluctance to interlope in the lives of one’s neighbors — "a very Iowa attitude," in the words of one local political scientist, derived in part from the state’s rural heritage — may help explain how Iowa finds itself in this moment. Add to that individualistic sensibility the state’s current political alignment and its little-known, pioneering legal past on once similarly volatile questions, like segregation and the role of women, and suddenly it seems far less surprising to outsiders that this could happen here in the seemingly endless, rolling acres of cornfields.
Iowa has a long history of fighting for equal rights for all and I think some of that relates very much to this "Iowa attitude" of tolerance. That's not to say all Iowans are tolerant, or that there aren't any wingnut haters here. There are. We will have to fight them every step of the way, but today is a great day in the history of the state of Iowa, today is the day when most Iowans will say to themselves, "Who am I to tell someone how to live?"
Click here to sign One Iowa's Guest Book and congratulate all the newlyweds!