Read Before Bashing

I have a modest request. Before you vote on judicial retention, read the ruling.

I know the Iowa Supreme Court's April 2009 decision in Varnum v. Brien (also posted below) is roughly 70 pages long. There are portions thick with cited precedent and legal doctrine. It can be a slog. But read it anyway.

It's the spark that fired this fight over the future of our courts. I'm amazed at how many people who call or write to express anger about the ruling have never cracked it open.

Instead, they're hearing from the throw-the-justices-out crowd, all the stuff about activist judges pushing personal agendas and slippery slopes to God knows what. Tune out the din for 30 minutes, please, and read the ruling.

If you do, I think you'll see where reality and rhetoric diverge sharply.

Backers of the state's marriage ban offered no compelling legal evidence to justify the state's denial of civil marriage rights to gays and lesbians. They couldn't prove the ban promoted procreation. Men and women who can't or won't have kids can still marry. They failed to prove that same-sex couples are inferior parents. No scientific evidence supported that claim. They failed to prove same-sex marriages would hurt traditional heterosexual unions. Ban backers couldn't cite any evidence that any harm would result.

On the score card of legal arguments, defenders scored a zero. They couldn't legally justify the law even when the court decided the ban didn't have to pass the strictest bar of constitutional scrutiny.

We now hear cries of activism, but for the court to have ruled otherwise, based on the arguments and evidence, it would have required an activist leap of stunning proportions. The justices would have had to declare a statute constitutional despite the government's complete failure to present one winning legal argument in its favor. It would have dramatically eroded the strength of our constitution's equal protection clause, which shields all of us from governmental persecution. That would have been a real slippery slope.

Instead, the court issued a ruling based on the constitutional doctrine that the state must show damn good reasons for denying rights to its citizens, just like Iowa justices did in the 1860s when they halted segregation and allowed a woman to practice law. They weren't trying to please anyone, or raise their approval ratings. They wanted to get it right.

Court-bashers, who lost the case, want you to buy the reckless notion that the court should have pandered to their brand of politics instead of weighing the record. Stop listening. Start reading.

Comments: (319) 398-452; todd.dorman@sourcemedia.net

Varnum Ia 20090403 Decision Ia Supreme Court