Michael Gartner says Republican presidential candidates and their supporters should read Iowa’s 2½–year-old same-sex marriage ruling instead of bashing it. If they did, they would find a ringing endorsement of freedom of religion, not a rebuke or challenge to it.
DES MOINES – Now that the campaign is ending in Iowa, here’s a question: Why have the candidates gone around the state bashing the Iowa Supreme Court decision that said persons of the same sex have the right to marry one another?
For that matter, why have their fundamentalist and evangelical supporters been bashing it?
Perhaps it’s time — after 2½ years — for those folks to read the 69-page decision. All of it.
If they do, they’ll hold it to their breasts. For Varnum v. Brien is a ringing endorsement of the freedom all of us — right and left and center and believer and non-believer and candidate and non-candidate — hold dear, the freedom of religion.
“I actually campaigned in Iowa against those justices” who were ousted after the decision, the devoutly evangelical Rick Santorum proudly said during a debate. Newt Gingrich, who lately has said that as president he would ignore court decisions he doesn’t like, helped finance Bob Vander Plaats’s campaign against the three justices who were on the ballot for an up-or-down vote in 2010.
Why?
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Read the complete commentary at Nieman Watchdog: http://bit.ly/sftufG
