Iowa Is Just Like Massachusetts, Only, You Know, It's In The Middle

So, it was way back in April 2009, that the Iowa Supreme Court, with its activist judges who legislate from the bench, legalized same-sex marriages over the objections of conservative wingnuts and religious zealots.

There was lots of talk about the End Of Days, the destruction of marriage, locusts; anything and everything that would ruin traditional marriage which has remained utterly unchanged for the last five thousand years years years years.

But, um, yeah, now the Iowa Department of Public Health has released the official numbers, y'all, and and here's the truth: marriage is up, divorce is down.

Wait, a sec, that wasn't supposed to happen. The homos were supposed to ruin everything for the regular [read: normal] people! But:

• Iowa posted the lowest number of divorces since 1970.
• 21,139 marriages occurred in Iowa last year--the most since 2000 and the first increase since 2005. The 1,573 jump in marriages over 2008 included the first-ever same-gender unions.
• 2,020 same-sex couples--728 male partners and 1,292 female partners--were married during that time span while 16,869 opposite-gender marriages were recorded.

Now, some folks are saying it's unclear to what extent same-sex unions are responsible for the spike--they also believe the economic downturn contributed to the change--but it is abundantly clear to anyone with half-a-brain [sorry, Steve King, this does not mean you] that legalizing marriage equality has had no adverse effect on the state.

But what those folks aren't saying is that this same trend occurred in Massachusetts after same-sex marriage was legalized there. In fact, Massachusetts now has the lowest divorce rates in the entire country. In fact, the numbers of divorces fell so drastically, they had to look as far back as World War II to find the same statistics.

So, the next time you hear someone talk about marriage equality being the ruin of traditional marriage, remind those asshats of Iowa and Massachusetts. Marriage equality is working. Like I knew it would.