U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, a Minnesota Republican, attacked Iowa’s judges again on April 11, telling an audience at The Family Leader’s presidential lecture series in Iowa that the state’s same-sex marriage ruling came from “black-robed masters.” Bachmann had been weighing a bid for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination since January.
“That’s what you had here in Iowa: black-robed masters. They are not our masters. They are not our morality,” Bachmann said, according to a Washington Blade account that cited Politico. She also told the audience that in 5,000 years of recorded human history, no society had defined marriage as anything other than a union between men and women.
Bachmann used the same phrase less than three weeks earlier. At a home-schooling convention in Des Moines on March 23, she praised Iowans for voting three justices off the Iowa Supreme Court the previous November. “You said enough is enough and sent them packing,” she said, according to CBS News, which cited Politico.
Voters removed the three justices in the Nov. 2, 2010, retention elections after the court struck down Iowa’s ban on same-sex marriage. The National Organization for Marriage spent $235,000 on Iowa television ads backing the campaign against them, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, which tracks judicial campaign ads. The Blade reported that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich arranged a $200,000 donation to the same campaign.
The court’s 2009 decision in Varnum v. Brien was unanimous. Justice Mark Cady, appointed by Republican Gov. Terry Branstad, wrote the opinion, and the court based the ruling on the equal protection guarantees of the Iowa Constitution.
Peter Hardin reported this story for Gavel Grab on April 12, 2011, when the site was a project of Justice at Stake. This account of the same events was written from the public record.
Join the discussion on r/ExistentialRepublic