One Iowa in the News: Iowa couple tired of GOP’s attacks on marriage
from The Washington Blade.
DES MOINES, Iowa — The 2012 presidential election campaign has been personal for John Sellers and Tom Helton.
...In an interview with the Washington Blade, Sellers, 51, a remote engineer for Clear Channel Radio, and Helton, 53, a clerical worker for the Iowa Department of Public Safety, expressed their unease with how the GOP contenders have addressed marriage.
“I know that not all Republicans feel that way,” Sellers said. “To a lot of people, it isn’t a huge issue. If you look at the latest poll results, the ones who are supportive of civil unions and marriages together, it’s the majority of the Republican Party.”
...Helton shared a similar sentiment that Republicans he knows are not as concerned about marriage as other issues — despite the GOP candidates attacking same-sex marriage as they have toured Iowa.
“I know a lot of Republican people that I work with and just acquaintances that really — I don’t want to say don’t care — but it’s not the main issue,” Helton said. “And a lot of the candidates like Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum, they’re focusing so much on that.”
The couple has been together 13 years and married in Des Moines on May 1, 2009, following a three-day waiting period after it was first possible for same-sex couples to obtain a marriage license in the state. Marriage equality was instituted in Iowa in 2009 when the Iowa Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the state constitution guaranteed marriage rights for gay couples.
...Troy Price, executive director of One Iowa, a statewide LGBT group, said the presidential election season has made 2012 “a tough caucus cycle for the LGBT community.”
“For nearly a year, presidential candidates have been crisscrossing our state trying to score political points on the backs of loving, committed gay and lesbian couples,” Price said. “It’s hard to measure the impact this has had, but the one thing we do know is that this negative, divisive, and mean-spirited rhetoric we have seen this year has had an emotional toll on LGBT couples and their families.”
Price added the thousands of same-sex couples who’ve exercised their marriage rights in Iowa are constantly hearing candidates pledging to terminate their unions in the media.
“Every time we open a newspaper or turn on the TV and see people claim to be trustworthy leaders while in the same breath invalidate our families or say that we are a ‘temporary aberration,’ it hurts,” Price said.
Read the full article from The Washington Blade.
Read more One Iowa in the News.
Read more In the News.
Find out more about the candidates--visit One Iowa's Caucus Tracker!
