WSJ letters on Iowa ruling

The Iowa Supreme Court has mandated same-sex marriage in the state.   Here are some letters to the editor, from the Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Judge quotes the court's complaint against "the disadvantages and fears they [homosexuals] face each day due to the inability to obtain a civil marriage in Iowa." The court then enumerates the legal disadvantages, which are all real -- no sharing in health insurance, pension benefits, hospital visitation rights, etc. The point, however, is not that there are disadvantages. The question is whether the disadvantages are based on a distinction made only by convention (and therefore changeable as a matter of custom) or by one that exists in nature (and therefore normative and morally imperative). The exact same disadvantages, after all, exist for mistresses, unmarried heterosexual lovers, and polygamists. If hardship is the criterion, should not all these be enfolded into the new definition of civil marriage? After all, they too, as the court said of homosexual couples, are "a historically disfavored class of persons [excluded] from a supremely important civil institution."

Absent from the article or the court's decision is any explanation of why marriage is so important as a civil institution. Aristotle begins "The Politics" not with a single individual, but with a description of a man and a woman together in the family, without which the rest of society cannot exist. Heterosexual sex in the family is normative as a matter of nature or what is known as natural law. All other sexual relationships can only ape it, and aspire to it (which explains the homosexual desire to mimic it).