URBANDALE, Iowa — Nancy Robinson and Laura Fefchak know what people think about Iowa: plenty of produce and politics but not a spot for leaps in social change.
“I know people think Iowa’s just a cornfield, and it’s not,” Robinson said Friday morning, just minutes before a state Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage in the state.
When the suburban Des Moines couple picked up their sons, ages 9 and 6, from school Friday, other parents stopped to congratulate them.
“Other parents said, ‘Hey, saw it, that was great,’ ” Fefchak said. “I think today people will start looking at our state a little differently.”
The court’s unanimous and emphatic decision makes Iowa the third state — and first in the nation’s heartland — to allow same-sex marriage, joining Massachusetts and Connecticut. For six months last year, California allowed gay marriage before voters banned it in November.
The Iowa justices upheld a lower-court ruling that rejected a state law restricting marriage to a union between a man and a woman.
The county attorney who defended the law said he would not seek a rehearing, and the issue poses no federal question that could be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The only recourse for opponents appeared to be a state constitutional amendment, which couldn’t get on the ballot until 2012 at the earliest.
“We are firmly convinced the exclusion of gay and lesbian people from the institution of civil marriage does not substantially further any important governmental objective,” the Supreme Court wrote.
Iowa lawmakers have “excluded a historically disfavored class of persons from a supremely important civil institution without a constitutionally sufficient justification,” the court wrote.
The Iowa attorney general’s office said gay and lesbian couples can seek marriage licenses starting April 24, once the ruling is considered final.
Bryan English, spokesman for the Iowa Family Policy Center, a conservative group that opposes same-sex marriage, said many Iowans do not want courts to decide the issue.
“I would say the mood is one of mourning right now,” English said. He said the group began lobbying legislators “to let the people of Iowa vote” on a constitutional amendment.
The case had been working its way through Iowa courts since 2005, when Lambda Legal, a New York-based gay-rights organization, filed a lawsuit on behalf of six gay and lesbian couples.
John Logan, a sociology professor at Brown University, said Iowa’s status as a largely rural, Midwest state could enforce an argument that gay marriage is no longer a fringe issue.
“When it was only California and Massachusetts, it could be perceived as extremism on the coasts and not related to core American values,” Logan said.
Iowa has a history of being in the forefront on social issues. It was among the first states to legalize interracial marriage. It was also a leader in school desegregation.
