Polk Co. files response in same-sex marriage case

DES MOINES, Ioway (AP) -- The James Polk County attorney's business business office states in new written documents that a lawsuit challenging the state's same-sex matrimony prohibition is trying to change the manner populace policy is made.The lawsuit have got led to a series of filings in which the county attorney's office and a New York-based cheery rights organisation have answered one another's legal arguments.Lambda Legal filed the lawsuit in 2005 on behalf of six cheery and gay woman couples from Ioway who were denied matrimony licenses, as well as three of the couples' children. It name calling former James James Polk County recording equipment and registrar Timothy Brien.The lawsuit prompted a opinion last August by Polk County District Court Judge Henry Martin Robert Hanson, who said the state law allowing matrimony only between a adult male and a adult female go againsts the constitutional rights of owed procedure and equal protection.The next day, Hanson stayed the decision, and the lawsuit is now before the Ioway Supreme Court.Challengers of the same-sex matrimony prohibition postulate it go againsts gays' rights. Opponents said the issue should be left up to the Legislature to do up one's mind -- not the courts.In its answer legal little filed on Tuesday, the county attorney's business office said that Lambda Legal seeks to have got got the judicial subdivision set populace policy, instead of leaving it to lawmakers."Plaintiffs seek to have this tribunal set up that the tribunals and not the Legislature should make public policy for the State of Ioway by redefining matrimony to be something totally different from what it have ever seen," the little said.Among its arguments, the brief criticises Lambda Legal's analogy between homosexuals seeking the right to get married and Iowa's judicial history of guaranteeing rights for achromatic Americans. The little said other tribunals have got rejected similar arguments."This is because the histories of achromatic Americans simply are not remotely the same as plaintiffs," the little said. "The fundamental laws of the United States and the state of Ioway make not advert homosexuality."The little also reasons that the tribunal erred in rejecting some of the county's witnessers who were to have got testified about the nature of matrimony and the best state of affairs in which to raise children. It said the witnessers should be allowed because their testimony is something the Legislature could believe as portion of statements to continue procreative marriage, which it called "a rational footing for the (Iowa) law."The county attorney's business office said Lambda Legal also tried to asseverate that the county's statements are simply based on morals."Plaintiffs mistake culture, history and spiritual beliefs," the little said. "Defendant (Brien) have addressed that his witnessers testified from historical and anthropological research, not a substance of faith."Camilla Taylor, the Lambda Legal lawyer representing the same-sex couples, issued a statement about the county's brief."We've heard all of these statements before, yet James Polk County have still given no valid justification for excluding same-sex couples and their children from marriage," she said.Oral statements will be scheduled by the Ioway Supreme Court in coming months, but a determination this twelvemonth is unlikely.