Iowa’s AG Tries End Run Around Gay-Marriage Ruling

The Iowa Supreme Court’s decision allowing gay marriage could not have been clearer. It said all Iowans have a right to equal protection and equal rights under the law. “If gay and lesbian people must submit to different treatment without an exceedingly persuasive justification, they are deprived of the benefits of the principle of equal protection upon which the rule of law is founded,” the court ruled in April in unanimously throwing out the state’s ban on gay marriage.

It noted there were more than 1,000 federal rights and responsibilities derived from marriage, and it said there were more than 200 Iowa statutes affected by marriage. These included everything from tax laws to the definition of a hospice patient’s family to wrongful-death statutes to the Iowa law noting that “children of married parents [are] legitimate.”

Who could not understand the court’s ruling?

Attorney General Tom Miller, for one. Or, at least, some lawyers who work for him.

Miller’s department has advised the Iowa Department of Public Health that, despite the court’s ruling, a child born to a married gay woman is a bastard. The gay woman’s female spouse cannot be listed on the child’s birth certificate, he said in “informal advice.” The spouse “could proceed with an adoption if she wanted to be listed as the parent on the child’s birth certificate,” the advice advised.

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