Gay Divorce in Iowa
A case in point has been the recent controversy over at Brooklyn College, involving the aborted bid of Sociology professor Timothy Shortell to become his department's chairman. The CUNY faculty union (the PSC) has claimed that the controversy violated Shortell's academic freedom. In an open letter to the Chancellor, PSC head Barbara Bowen demanded that CUNY, among other things, officially condemn an article on the controversy published in the New York Daily News. The piece, which unfortunately is now off-line, contained quotes from several students (of differing genders and faiths) about Shortell's anti-religious comments. Only in an intellectually hermetically-sealed community could someone think that the outside world would find persuasive the argument that a newspaper article quoting the college's students about a professor's controversial remarks constituted not only a threat to academic freedom but a threat of such graveness that the article itself required an official condemnation by CUNY administrators.
Today's news provided an example of"groupthink" from the other ideological extreme. Iowa's Supreme Court refused to overturn a ruling from a district court judge, who had presided over Iowa's first gay divorce. (Officially it wasn't a divorce but a dissolution of a Vermont civil union.) The case was a peculiar one: the divorce was amicable; and the district court judge initially signed off on the forms thinking the matter was a regular divorce, without closely examining the names of the two litigants. When the oversight was brought to the judge's attention, however, he simply amended his ruling and dissolved the civil union.
In response, six conservative politicians, three Christian activists, a pastor, and a church(!)--the Church of Christ of Le Mars--filed suit. They demanded that the state Supreme Court overturn the ruling dissolving the civil union. The plaintiffs contended
The Iowa public has an interest in preserving the integrity of the marital union by making opposite-sex marriage the exclusive form of family relationship endorsed by the government. Loss of this exclusive endorsement will de-emphasize the importance of traditional opposite-sex marriage to society, weakening this vital institution, and placing our entire democratic system in jeopardy by eroding its foundation.
A dissolution of a civil union in Iowa is placing our entire democratic system in jeopardy by eroding its foundation? Like the PSC on the extreme left, the extreme right flank of gay marriage opponents appears to test their ideas only on fellow true believers. I'm hard pressed to understand how any lawyer could have presented such an argument to his or her state's highest court with a straight face.
In the end, the Iowa Supreme Court dismissed the lawsuit on a technicality. The Court contended that the plaintiffs lacked standing to file the case because the ruling did not cause them individual harm or otherwise affect them in any individual way. The decision itself is online and worth a read. Despite (or, perhaps, because of) the Court's decision to dismiss the suit on technical grounds, the ruling is almost openly contemptuous of the primary arguments against gay marriage. This, of course, is the main reason why opponents of gay marriage have gone the constitutional amendment route. Maybe they can get together with Barbara Bowen and next claim that gay divorce violates their academic freedom.