Legal marriage worth the wait

Johnson County Recorder Kim Painter stood on firm ground this spring when she urged colleagues to comply with orders to start issuing same-sex marriage licenses.

After all, just five years earlier, despite her strong beliefs and personal stake in the matter, she had turned away dozens of same-sex couples who filled the county administration building to demand she accept their applications for marriage.

She made a lot of people unhappy by refusing to participate in that act of civil disobedience.

But she said then, as she told colleagues this spring, it's her job to carry out the law as it is, not as she wishes it would be.

It was just a happy accident she got a chance to use that principled stand as a persuasive example to her peers. She'd always hoped, of course, that the law would change. But she had no way to know.

"If you go by the book, will you still get there or not? You can't tell," she told me Thursday.

And now, despite initial pressure from some political and religious groups, recorders have been taking applications from same- and opposite-sex couples for months.

There's been little fanfare and, aside from a few vocal opponents, the idea already seems -- ho-hum -- routine. Just part of what Painter calls the "orderly process of local civil government at work."

There have been no throngs of gay couples storming the county to get hitched. Oh some have -- much like opposite-sex couples always have come here to marry at a Hawkeye game, or because they're from here or met here or for whatever reason.

The difference, of course, is that those gay couples go home to states where their marriage isn't recognized.

That's how it was for Iowa's same-sex couples before the law changed. They could take vows of commitment or travel to places where they could legally wed.

Not Painter. She wanted to get married. For real. Here.

"In certain ways, I guess I'm just kind of old fashioned," she said. "I thought it sounded good to be a married woman in Iowa."

It is good, she now reports. Earlier this month, Painter finally reaped the benefit of the law she has upheld in good times and bad, marrying her partner of more than a decade.

It was a candlelight affair. Just a few witnesses and close family members. Private, personal and oh-so-meaningful.

"It was the first opportunity we had to be married," she said. "Absolutely. That's what it is."

Legal, binding and worth the wait.

Jennifer Hemmingsen's column appears on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Contact the writer: (319) 339-3154 or jennifer.hemmingsen@gazcomm.comw