Wednesday was a difficult day for The American Independent News Network, which is the larger entity that operates The Iowa Independent. Our chief executive and founder announced two of our sister sites would close and their content would be moved to The American Independent.
A recently introduced bill could have far-reaching impact on the U.S. sugar industry, including American Crystal Sugar, a farmer-owned cooperative that locked out 1,300 Midwest workers on Aug. 1.
The chairman for Herman Cain’s Iowa effort says the campaign “relied more on the word of farmers than Washington regulators” in deciding to run an ad containing claims the Environmental Protection Agency says are false.
The Iowa Senate will remain under the control of a slim 26-25 Democratic majority when it reconvenes in January 2012.
Despite efforts by a Republican state senator and several conservative groups to convince county recorders to ignore the Iowa Supreme Court and refuse to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, so far local officials have followed the law without incident.
The Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage goes into effect today, and couples have lined up at courthouses around the state to finally have their relationships legally recognized.
Sen. Merlin Bartz, a Republican from Grafton, has spent the last few weeks urging county recorders to disobey the law, despite warnings from Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller that doing so could result in being removed from office. Then the Alliance Defense Fund, an Arizona-based legal advocacy group founded in 1994 by Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, and the Iowa Family Policy Center sent an e-mail to Iowa’s 99 county recorders informing them that they would receive free legal defense if they defied the law.
The efforts appear to have been unsuccessful, as county recorders have decided to follow the court’s ruling and issue licenses.
“My personal belief is that a marriage should be between a man and a woman, but I did take an oath of office as county recorder, which states that I support the Constitution of the state of Iowa, so I will be treating all applications for marriage licenses the same — it’s simple as that,” Sioux County Recorder Anita Van Bruggen told the Quad City Times.
Sioux County is not only the most conservative part of Iowa, referred to by many as Iowa’s Bible Belt, but it is more conservative than any other county in the country, according to the Cook Political Report’s Partisan Voting Index.
Several county recorders issued similar statements to the Iowa Independent over the weekend. Republican Craig Franken, who serves as county recorder for Butler County in northern Iowa, said his office will make no distinction between same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples when it comes to marriage licenses, per the Supreme Court’s ruling.
According to several media reports, marriage applications have been received in Bremer, Butler, Cerro Gordo, Chickasaw, Dallas, Dubuque, Fayette, Floyd, Fremont, Grundy, Guthrie, Howard, Linn, Mitchell, Pottawattamie, Polk, Harrison, Johnson, Mills, Winneshiek, Woodbury and Worth counties.
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