one more gratifying newspaper column, this one from the Trib:

Once again, a humble Midwestern state is being laughed at by cosmopolitan smarty-pants on the East and West coasts. The victim this time, of course, is Iowa, which recently had the gall to legalize gay marriage and attempt to mess up decades of perfectly good Midwestern stereotyping.

People on the coasts gasped: “Iowa? Isn’t that where they grow the corn our personal chefs turn into polenta?” Jon Stewart piled on, showing a picture of a lone farm tractor pulling a trailer and claiming it was a shot of Iowa’s most recent gay pride parade. Among gay marriage advocates, the mantra soon became, “If they can do it in Iowa, they can do it anywhere.”

You see what’s happening here? The Midwest – and that includes us, fellow Illinoisans – is again being painted with a broad, sable-hair brush. Some see the Iowa Supreme Court’s gay marriage ruling as staggering not because of what it accomplished but because of where it went down.

i thought the Daily Show’s spot was pretty uninspired too. no big surprise, but  disappointing in light of how self-righteous Stewart has been on the marriage issue (the old “i understand teh gays better than you ’cause I live in Queertopia USA”).

Bill Maher also had a pretty gratuitous crack — something along the lines of “the gay community in Iowa was elated…both of them! but then they realized, oh fuck, we live in Iowa.” but he went on to acknowledge, in what I guess passes for a sincere tone coming from him, that Iowa had succeeded where California failed, and that Iowa is therefore, in fact, “hipper.” considering how smarmy and superior Maher habitually comes off, especially when talking about the hicks and goobers of middle america, it amounted to a pretty classy gesture.

IF it weren’t for Iowa, my family may never have existed, and this gay, biracial New Yorker might never have been born.

In 1958, when my mother, who was white, and father, who was black, wanted to get married in Nebraska, it was illegal for them to wed. So they decided to go next door to Iowa, a state that was progressive enough to allow interracial marriage.
…
That I almost cried last week upon reading that the Iowa Supreme Court overturned the state law banning same-sex marriage will therefore come as no surprise. I’m still struck by one thought: over the years, I’ve met so many gay émigrés who felt it was unsafe to be gay in so-called flyover country and fled for the East and West coasts. But as a gay man, I can’t marry in “liberal” New York, where I’m a resident, or in “liberal” California, where I was born, and very soon I will have that right in “conservative” Iowa.