Culver, Harkin back civil marriage ruling

GRIMES – Gov. Chet Culver has a message Monday for county recorders being asked to provide marriage license applications to same-sex couples: follow the law.

“The court has spoken loudly and clearly in a unanimous way. It's time to move on and respect the court,” the governor said.

Monday marked the first day that same gender couples could apply for an Iowa marriage license and scores of couples showed up at county recorder offices to pick up applications.

The day's activities statewide were made possible by an April 3 Iowa Supreme Court ruling which declared as unconstitutional a 1998 Iowa law that defined marriage as solely between one man and one woman. The court's order became effective on Monday.

Culver, a first-term Democrat facing re-election in 2010, said he was “100 percent” in accord with Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller that county recorders have no other option that to follow the Iowa Supreme Court directive even if they personally oppose gay marriage.

“This is a duty and a responsibility that these elected officials have under Iowa law and they'll be expected to follow that and I believe they will,” Culver told reporters outside a meeting he attended at the Dallas Center-Grimes high school.

The governor also said it's time for Iowans to aggressively focus on economic recovery and rebuilding the state's aging and disaster-damaged infrastructure rather than getting “sidetracked by divisive, partisan politics.”

Religious, conservative, GOP and pro-family forces have lined up against the court ruling and were calling for a constitutional amendment to once again declare that legal marriage in Iowa can only be defined as between one man and one woman.

Top legislative Democrats whose party holds majorities in the House and Senate blocked efforts to begin the process of amending the Constitution during the 2009 session, which ended early Sunday.

Culver has said he would abide by the court's unanimous decision because it maintained churches' right to sanction marriages only involving opposite-gender couples while opening the civil marriage process to gay and lesbian couples.

“For me, it was a very clear cut case that the idea of amending the Constitution to do something that the Iowa Supreme Court said would be discriminatory and unlawful is not a good option,” Culver told reporters Monday.

U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, also attended Monday's meeting that drew 450 participants government entities, groups or communities from across Iowa to find out about grant opportunities or ways to draw down federal stimulus dollars.

Harkin said the Supreme Court's ruling on gay marriage falls in line with Iowa's long tradition of being a leader on civil rights issues that dates back more than a century in addressing slavery segregation in schools and admitting female attorneys to the bar association.

“Those were all controversial at that time. We look back now and say -- what was the fuss all about. That's the way I see this” Harkin said.

“Time heals all wounds,” he added. “I think in the future people will shrug their shoulders and say what was the fuss all about.

“It won't take that long. I think things will calm down. As long as there is no drive -- and this is where I draw the line -- in mandating churches have to perform any kind of ceremony that is outside of their religious belief. That I'm  vehemently opposed to. But as the civil side goes, I think we're going to abide by the Supreme Court decision and I think in a few years it'll all be ho-hum.”