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  Iowa Beats Vermont

  Posted Friday, April 03, 2009 12:50 PM | By E.J. Graff

  ... and not in football or hockey or whatever sport would bring the two together, but in the race to be the third American state to gender-neutralize its marriage laws. According to today's Iowa Supreme Court decision, scheduled to take effect 21 days from now, same-sex couples should be free to marry.

  I grew up in Illinois and Ohio and moved to the greater Cambridge, Mass., area for many different reasons: the intellectualism, the politics, and—not least—what we used to call the "women's community" (now we would say "for the girls")—just as my Ohio University best buddy, Eric, moved to San Francisco for the boys. I used to joke that I was very happy to have escaped the vowel states for some solidly consonant-bound locations. Although I have been known to tell my piously liberal New England friends that they ought to get out and visit America sometimes, I have actually been relieved to live in a region so friendly to my various proclivities.

  When a Lambda Legal attorney first told me they were bringing a marriage lawsuit in Iowa, you could have heard my eyes roll before I started arguing that it was a bad idea. My LGBT advocate friends told me I was wrong: Iowa was, for many reasons, a friendly state for such a suit. They were right. I was wrong. The vowels have it. Congratulations, Hawkeyes, on your commitment to equal protection under the law!

  I hope you manage to keep it!

  (Note to Vermont: See if you can become No. 4 before California or New Hampshire beats you to it.)
  

  Filed under: marriage, LGBT rights, same-sex marriage

About E.J. Graff

• E.J. Graff is associate director and senior researcher at Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, where she directs the Gender & Justice Project. She is a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center. As a journalist and author, her work has appeared in such venues as The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy magazine, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, Columbia Journalism Review, Good Housekeeping, The Nation, The New Republic, and in more than a dozen anthologies. She collaborated on former Massachusetts Lt. Governor Evelyn Murphy's book Getting Even: Why Women Don't Get Paid Like Men--and What To Do About It (Simon & Schuster, 2005). Her first book, What Is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution, has been widely cited in legal journals, reprinted for academic use, entered as courtroom exhibits, and quoted by government policymaking bodies.

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