Posted by Chairm
The Iowa judiciary has produced two pro-SSM court opinions. The first is that of the trial judge and the second, on appeal, is that of the high court. A court's opinion consists of its reasoning on the case before it; where there is a conflict between a statute and the state constitution, an opinion describes the principles the court applied and explains how it weighed the conflict(s) at stake.
In Iowa the judicary imposed SSM just ten years after Iowans had expressly voted against it.
Jennifer Roback Morse writes:
[Click here to read the rest][T]he trial court refused to hear relevant evidence. When the case made its way to the Iowa Supreme Court, they didn’t behave much better.
This was a staged case. These couples went to the clerk’s office intending to be refused. They sued Timothy Brien, Polk County recorder and registrar, an ordinary county employee.
[...]
They had the backing of homosexual-rights establishment organizations. The Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund took in $20 million in 2007. Lambda Legal is a nonprofit devoted solely to bringing legal challenges like these.
[...]
Most citizens do not realize that this mismatch of legal resources is typical for advocacy cases.[...]
The trial court refused to hear the testimony of Allan Carlson, author of five books on the history of marriage, Margaret Somerville, founding director of the McGill University Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law, and Stephen Rhodes, political science professor at the University of Virginia. This is the very sort of evidence that courts in other states, such as New York, have found persuasive.
[...]
When this case went to the Supreme Court of Iowa, several friends of the court pleaded with them to reopen the admissibility of the evidence, to hear it, and to consider it. The Supreme Court said, “The error committed by the trial court in failing to do so is of no consequence” since they were going to review it themselves.
But their review didn’t amount to much. As for the parenting issue, surely one of the most significant issues under discussion, the court relegated it to a footnote.
[...]
Just realize that the Supreme Court of Iowa did not do the public the courtesy of citing a single source in support of [its own claim that "the traditional notion that children need a mother and a father to be raised into healthy, well-adjusted adults is based more on stereotype than anything else".
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Also see:
Iowa Judge Excluded Expert Testimony.
Wow! Just Wow!
ReplyDeleteIf/when this issue ever goes before SCOTUS, I think the ISC is going to wish they'd bothered to do their homework. This is extremely prejudicial evidence against their ruling.
It's really ridiculous to me that on one hand we have conservatives who oppose gay marriage that proclaim:
ReplyDelete"Gay marriage advocates are out to destroy the family!"While on the other hand, we hear advocates of gay marriage say:
"No we're not out to destroy the family -- don't be a moron!"And then in court, the black robed tyrants tell us:
"This 'Mom & Dad' business is just an anti-gay stereotype" and rule in favor of the gay activists.
Tell me again how they aren't trying to destroy the family?
Sigh... blogger.com can't figure out a paragraph break again. Luckily, you're smart enough to make sense of the above, even if the formatting was lost. Cheers.
ReplyDeleteSCOTUS at the moment would back up the 30 states with constitutional definitions of marriage. We'll see how the court plays out after Obama gets done making his appointments. (That one reason alone was enough for me not to vote for Obama.)
ReplyDelete