Ruth Institute Blog

Regular readers of my blog and newsletter will recall that I analyzed the Supreme Court of Iowa’s ruling that gendered marriage violates the state constitution. You could pretty much predict how the court would rule, by the decisions they made about what counted as permissible evidence.

the trial court refused to admit five out of the eight expert witnesses presented to them. These experts covered a wide range of issues, including the ethics of artificial reproductive technologies, the rights of children to be raised by their parents, the procreative purpose of marriage, the history and meaning of marriage, and the significance of gender differences in parenting. The trial court refused to hear the testimony of Allan Carlson, author of five books on the history of marriage, Margaret Somerville, founding director of the McGill University Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law, and Stephen Rhodes, political science professor at the University of Virginia. This is the very sort of evidence that courts in other states, such as New York, have found persuasive.

After refusing to hear their testimony, the court had the nerve to declare a whole list of facts were “undisputed.” Instead of listening to both sides and deciding impartially, the court lifted the “facts” directly from the brief of the same-sex “marriage” advocates.

The Iowa Supreme Court is the very court that made this infamous statement in a footnote:

“The research appears to strongly support the conclusion that same-sex couples foster the same wholesome environment as opposite-sex couples and suggests that the traditional notion that children need a mother and a father to be raised into healthy, well-adjusted adults is based more on stereotype than anything else.”

The court offered no evidence for the remarkable claim that believing kids need a mother and a father is based on stereotype.  And if you took that statement out of the context of the same sex marriage debate, and tried to offer it as a general proposition, it is certainly false.