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Old 31st August 2009, 02:30 PM   #140
Brown
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Originally Posted by me View Post
In a story that is of no surprise at all, Iowa has been targeted by an anti-gay marriage group.
In the newest developments, several people are crossing state lines to get married in Iowa. There are the expected Republican (capital R) bluster bites that vow to make this sort of thing a campaign issue, plus a modest effort to try to use the ballot box to recall the justices of the Iowa Supreme Court.

The head of the National Organization for Marriage has denied that the group supports bigotry. (How could anyone possibly have mistaken this organization's lofty civic goal--that of allowing the people of the State to have their say--with the nefarious goal of preventing people from getting married merely because they don't like them, even though they don't know them? Of course, if the voters decide that the sky hasn't fallen and that the state constitution ought not to be changed, this group will accept that decision and go away. Won't it?)

Another development is that in an election for the Iowa House, the Democratic candidate has raised $42,882, and the Republican candidate has raised $63,101. But the "New Jersey-based National Organization for Marriage, a group that opposes marriage for same-sex couples, has spent $86,080 on television ads in support of" the Republican candidate.

The notion of out-of-state influence is often a sore point, with many Iowans preferring to say that Iowans will mind their OWN business, thank you very much, and they do not need out-of-staters telling them what they ought to do. Right now, the notion of influence is raising its head in Iowa in a different context: Senator Chuck Grassley, a major recipient of campaign contributions from the so-called health industry, is being taken to task for apparently representing that industry rather than the people of Iowa. Grassley's position is: the campaign contributions have no effect on his positions. Meanwhile, good ol' Chuck is overtly raising funds on a platform of defeating "Obama-care."
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