Tom Fiebiger, a Democratic state senator from North Dakota, has mixed emotions about the events of April 3. On that morning, he learned that Iowa was to become the first state in the Midwest to recognize same-sex marriages. In the afternoon, he watched as his own state's House of Representatives voted 54-to-34 to kill a bill that would have protected North Dakotans from being fired, denied credit, or evicted because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. As the father of a gay son and the bill's chief sponsor in the Senate—where it passed 27-to-19 in a bipartisan vote—Fiebiger views the Iowa ruling as "kind of bittersweet."
The news from Vermont was kind of bittersweet, too. For four days, the Iowa Supreme Court's unanimous decision was being talked about as perhaps the unlikely tipping point for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights movement. But then Vermont's legislature gave a thumbs-up to same-sex marriage, and the attention turned back toward the coasts—and ongoing battles in California and the Northeast.
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http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/04/marriage-can-wait
