What's the Matter with Iowa?

The Governor of Iowa weighed in mendaciously yesterday on the Iowa Supreme Court's abusive ruling on homosexual "marriage," declaring--in a trope familiar to pro-choice Catholic politicians--that, while he personally felt marriage should be a bond between a man and a woman, he couldn't impose his personal, religious preferences which were only "a tenet of my personal faith."

The dishonesty of his position was compounded by his declaration that "I am reluctant to support amending the Iowa Constitution to add a provision that our Supreme Court has said is unlawful and discriminatory," overlooking the fact that such an amendment would not make the provision unlawful or discriminatory under Iowa law.

The real point of the misruling, as with the abortion misrulings over the last 35 years, was to continue the overturn of the influence of traditional sexual morality in public affairs. As with the abortion cases, we see that elected officials will first plead helplessness in the face of judicial activism, and then declare the matter "settled law," as though the law, in this case, were anything other than the whim of the Supreme Court.

The core purpose, as I pointed out earlier, of civil marriage is to establish a social commitment to and privileging of the procreation AND upbringing of children by legally committed pairs of mothers and fathers. Whether or not homosexuals might choose to commit themselves to such relationships is not of interest to this state commitment, since maximising the private pleasure of the married couples is not a state interest, any more than making sure, say, a significant number of Jews choose to enter into the hog-slaughtering business.

What's at issue here is the right of children to a committed mother and father from the first day of their lives, and the means the state takes to promote and defend that right. Presenting the children that some putative homosexuals bring into homosexual relationships as the children of that homosexual pairing, as the Iowa Supreme Court did repeatedly to attempt to obscure that core commitment, strikes directly at the biological reality of the perpetuation both of the nation and of the human race.

The Purpose of Marriage

In the course of Philo-Junius' examination of the illegitimacy of the Iowa Supreme Court's decision mandating the absurdity of homosexual marriage, it may be useful once again to remind everyone of the traditional meaning of marriage, taken from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, which the Iowa Supreme Court felt keenly enough to spend three pages arguing veiledly against under the heading of "Religious Opposition to Same-Sex Marriage", even though the arguments themselves are not exclusively religious, nor, unfortunately, did they form any coherent part of the defendants' arguments, making the Court's shadow-boxing even more telling:

"DEARLY beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the face of this congregation, to join together this Man and this Woman in holy Matrimony; which is an honourable estate...therefore is not by any to be enterprised, nor taken in hand, unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly, to satisfy men's carnal lusts and appetites, like brute beasts that have no understanding; but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in the fear of God; duly considering the causes for which Matrimony was ordained.

First, It was ordained for the procreation of children...

Secondly, It was ordained...to avoid fornication; that such persons as have not the gift of continency might marry...

Thirdly, It was ordained for the mutual society, help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity..."