Op-Ed Columnist
 |
| Frank Bruni, NY Times |
Heartland Justice
By FRANK BRUNI
Published: May 5, 2012
WE tend to think of people who play pivotal roles in the advancement of
social justice — and who pay steep prices for it — as passionate
advocates with intense connections to their cause. We imagine them as
crusaders.
Marsha Ternus wasn’t. She just tried to be fair.
The first woman ever to preside over the Iowa Supreme Court, she was
asked three years ago to rule on a challenge to an Iowa statute banning
same-sex marriage. She looked at the case and at the law and deemed the
ban a violation of equal-protection language in the state’s
Constitution, which said that no privileges should be reserved for a
limited class of citizens. Her six fellow justices agreed. Their unanimous decision is why Iowa is among the minority of states in which two men or two women can marry.
It’s also why Ternus lost her job. The following year, she and two other
justices came up for what are usually pro forma retention votes, and
Iowans booted them from the bench. National groups on the religious
right had mounted a furious campaign against them, calling them members
of “an arrogant elite” with a “radical political and social agenda.”
“We laughed about that,” Ternus told me, referring to the accusation,
not its career-ending consequence. “I mean, honestly, I can remember the
first time somebody used the words ‘gay marriage.’ And I said, ‘What is
that?’ ”
Which happened... when?
“Sadly, not that long ago,” she said, looking embarrassed.
It was news to Ternus when I mentioned that on Tuesday, North
Carolinians would be voting on a constitutional same-sex marriage ban,
which will probably pass. She doesn’t track the issue, though it continues to dominate the news, as it did last week when an openly gay aide supportive of marriage equality quit
Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. And she has rarely given
interviews about the ouster of her and her colleagues David Baker and
Michael Streit, who have been similarly reticent. None of them, she
said, wanted their hurt feelings in the foreground.
“The important thing that happened wasn’t us losing our jobs,” she said
over dinner here on Thursday. “It’s what it represents about what people
think of justice and the rule of law and constitutional rights.”
Ternus, who is 60, agreed to meet with me because on Monday, she, Baker
and Streit are receiving Profile in Courage awards from the John F.
Kennedy Library Foundation in Boston. The timing, she said, felt right.
But she worried that she was talking too much about herself and too far beyond her authority.
“I’m just a judge from Iowa,” she said, speaking of the past in the
present tense. “What do I know?” She had just been to the hairdresser’s —
her flight to Boston was in the morning — and was allowing herself a
Key lime martini.
Until she encountered so much religious opposition to the court’s
decision, some of it from Catholics, she was a loyal member of her local
Catholic parish. Two of her three children graduated from Catholic high
schools. One went to Notre Dame University.
Ternus’s parents and grandparents and great-grandparents were all
farmers, and she’s the oldest of six children reared among fields of
corn and soybeans, with a wood-burning stove in the kitchen.
“Don’t make me sound like ‘Little House on the Prairie,’ ” she pleaded.
She said her childhood wasn’t nearly as austere as that.
At the University of Iowa, she majored in home economics. Law school
entered her thoughts only when a job after college as a bank teller
bored her to tears.
I asked about gay people in her life. She mentioned a man who lived in a
nearby apartment at college and an architect she has worked with. “But
was my best friend gay or anything like that?” she said. “No.” Nor are
any relatives, as far as she knows.
She said that after the ruling, “when I saw and heard the reaction of
people whom it actually impacted, I just couldn’t — I mean — it was
amazing to me. I just had never been conscious of how meaningful it was
to gay and lesbian couples.”
Ternus spent her early legal career as a litigator specializing in
insurance law. She was appointed to the Supreme Court, her first
judgeship, in 1993, by a Republican governor. In Iowa, voters weigh in
at later intervals, usually every eight years, but many don’t bother to.
Their rejection of Ternus, Baker and Streit was the first such
dismissal of Supreme Court justices in the history of the state’s
current system.
SHE said that she and the other justices knew there was risk in taking
on the same-sex marriage case and began researching it months before
hearing arguments. They agonized over the wording of the decision.
As for the decision itself, they learned in the first hours of
discussion that none of them saw any way to square the marriage ban with
equal-protection language. “Everyone’s jaws dropped — that we had a
unanimous decision,” she recalled.
Theodore B. Olson,
one of the lawyers who has argued the high-profile case against
California’s same-sex marriage prohibition, praised the Iowa justices’
ruling for its painstaking thoroughness.
“What the Iowa Supreme Court did — and they did a terrific job of this —
was to go through the objections systematically,” he told me.
That same-sex marriage offended tradition? Well, many musty traditions
proved indefensible over time. That marriage was for procreation?
Childless couples abounded. That it undermined religious tenets? The
court was dealing with civil marriage, not church weddings. That it
devalued male-female unions, as conservative religious groups claim?
Ternus told me: “If these organizations are really worried about
marriage, rather than being motivated by bigotry and hatred, then they
would be going after the divorce laws. But they’re not.”
What most concerns her, though, is what she sees as the politicization
of the judiciary, with elected officials and partisan groups firing
warning shots at judges and screening them for preordained allegiances.
The judiciary, she said, can check and balance legislatures — and mete
out true justice — only by being less casually reactive to public
opinion.
A registered independent, she said that she and her fellow justices divorced politics from their thinking.
Referring to her subsequent punishment at the polls, she said, “If
people think that what happened here doesn’t influence other judges,
they’re really naïve.”
She now gives speeches (usually for no charge) on that topic. Even so she has time for once neglected chores.
“The first week I was off, I took everything out of the kitchen
cupboards and I washed them all down,” she said. “And then I cleaned
every closet in the house. And I’m telling you, the pleasure that gave
me was indescribable.”
No comments:
Post a Comment