Iowa Supreme Court Justice David Wiggins vows he won t stand quietly by if opponents of same-sex marriage launch a potent campaign to oust him from the bench.
If someone wants to attack me, I m not going to let them bully me, Wiggins said in a telephone interview last week with The Des Moines Register. If asked to, I ll speak up for myself. The others didn t do that last time. I will.
Wiggins this fall will become the fourth member of Iowa s highest court to stand for a retention vote since the court issued a landmark 2009 decision legalizing same-sex marriage in the state. The unanimous Varnum v. Brien decision, which outraged social conservatives, made Iowa the first Midwestern state to sanction gay marriage.
Attention on the issue ramped up last week when President Barack Obama stated his support for same-sex marriage, the first sitting president to do so. Also last week, voters in North Carolina approved a law defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman, and in Colorado, a bill to allow civil unions for same-sex couples failed to advance in that state s Legislature.
Same-sex marriage was already expected to be a white-hot issue in this fall s Iowa Statehouse races. Same-sex marriage opponents have vowed to take control of the Senate, where Democrats now hold a majority and party leadership has blocked a proposed constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage.
After the 2009 ruling, Iowa voters in November 2010 denied three justices the opportunity to remain on the bench. David Baker, Michael Streit and Marsha Ternus became the first Iowa Supreme Court justices not retained by voters since Iowa adopted a merit selection and retention system for judges in 1962.
The three former justices gained national recognition last week when they accepted the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage award at the Kennedy presidential library in Boston. Bob Vander Plaats, who led the campaign to oust them, called the award a slap in the face to the people of Iowa and an incentive to lead more campaigns to boot the other justices who joined the ruling.
Wiggins, 60, said he knows he ll face opposition during this year s retention vote. He and the high court s six other members have spent more time in the past year talking to community and civic groups about the court and holding oral arguments in settings around the state. Little of that occurred in the years before the 2010 vote.
The justices also didn t campaign during retention elections.
Baker, in his speech accepting the Profile in Courage Award, said that he, Streit and Ternus made a deliberate decision not to form campaign committees in 2010.
Our founding fathers chose wisely to not have judges in a political position, Baker told the audience, which included Wiggins. Had we chosen to form campaigns, we would have tacitly admitted that we were what we claimed not to be politicians. We strongly believed that the people of Iowa did not want us to be in the position of raising money for a campaign.
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