Same-sex couples in Iowa began holding hastily planned weddings on Monday as the state became the third in the US to allow gay marriage, a leap that even some supporters find hard to grasp in the country’s heartland.
Within hours of a state Supreme Court ruling legalizing gay marriage taking effect, several same-sex couples had exchanged vows on the steps of the Polk County Administrative Building.
“It’s not very romantic, is it?” Melisa Keeton joked, referring to the location of the ceremony and the media attention, before marrying Shelley Wolfe.
The couple were allowed to wed after getting a judge to waive the state’s three-day waiting period. The waiver was granted after the couple claimed the wait was stressful on Keeton, who is pregnant and due in August.
The couple, who will go by the last name Keeton, were married by the Reverend Peg Esperanza of the Church of the Holy Spirit. She later married at least two other couples, all at no charge.
“God sent me here today and I’ve said OK,” said Esperanza, a lesbian who plans to marry her partner in October.
On April 3, the Iowa justices upheld a lower court ruling that rejected a state law restricting marriage to a union between a man and woman. The decision added Iowa to the list of states where gay marriage is legal, joining Massachusetts and Connecticut. A Vermont law allowing gay marriage will take effect in September.
Officials said the Polk County recorder’s office had received 82 marriage applications from same-sex couples by 4pm.
One of them was Alicia Zacher, 24, and Jessica Roach, 22, who waited in a misting rain to enter the office and file their application. They later got a waiver and planned to get married as soon as possible after seeing how California voters last year reinstated a ban on same-sex marriage.
“You just never know when they’ll try to take it away,” Roach said.
A poll by the University of Iowa taken just before the high court’s ruling showed 26 percent of Iowans support gay marriage.
That number rises to more than 50 percent when people were asked if they supported either gay marriage or civil unions.
“If they want to marry, I don’t see a reason not to let them,” said Joe Biase, a 31-year-old university student from Des Moines.
“For a state in the heartland, it’s come a long way,” he said.
Still, the issue is far from settled.
Bryan English of the Iowa Family Policy Center, which opposes same-sex marriage, said the legislature and Governor Chet Culver had put some “poor county recorders in an awfully tough position today” by not working to block the court’s ruling from taking effect.
The group wants the state to begin the multiyear process of amending Iowa’s Constitution to overturn the court decision.
Culver and majority Democrats have refused, which Republicans predicted would hurt Democrats in next year’s elections.
One gubernatorial candidate, Sioux City businessman Bob Vander Plaats, has already made gay marriage a focal point of his run for the Republican nomination.
“This will be a major issue in the campaign of 2010,” Vander Plaats said.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but