Yayy Polk County!
A [Polk County] county judge has struck down a ban on same-sex marriages in the US state of Iowa as unconstitutional.
Judge Robert Hanson ruled that a law allowing marriage only between men and women violated the rights of due process and equal protection.
(via the BBC)
There is still the matter of the bigots who will no doubt turn around and try to wedge hate into the Iowa constitution, but Judge Hanson did one thing that will make that just a little more difficult: he ordered that the county issue marriage licenses to the couples who brought the discrimination suit. The bigots will, of course, attempt to overturn those licenses, but when you're at the voting booth it's a little bit more difficult to vote to strip rights from Bill & Fred down at the hardware store, Al & James who run the dairy farm up the road, or Sue & Janet who occasionally babysit your children than it is to strip rights from some hypothetical gay bogeyman that the fundamentalist bigots on TV keep talking about.
And those fundamentalist bigots on TV? Most of them are gay, too, but so deeply closeted that they can't differentiate love from hate. Perhaps seeing the chains being struck from other people will break the shell around their hearts and allow them to come out and finally be happy.