They're lining up at the courthouse...

Today was the first day for same-sex couples to marry in Iowa. Here's the Des Moines Register's web section on the topic. The Register's update from late April 27 said that over 360 couples have applied to be married.

Not to rain on anyone's parade, but even state-permitted marriage for same sex couples only goes so far. On Reason's website, Steve Chapman makes "A Federal Case for Gay Marriage."

Here's the thrust of Chapman's essay:

It's at moments like this that the framers of the Constitution begin to look even wiser than usual. Somehow they anticipated that people in Massachusetts would not want to live under exactly the same laws as people in Mississippi. So they set up a system known as federalism, which allows different states to choose different policies. Thus we simultaneously uphold majority rule and minority rights.

This, at least, is how federalism is supposed to operate—letting subsets of the national population get their way in their own locales. There's only one hitch: In this case, it doesn't quite work that way.

Why not? Because of a huge imbalance created by that longtime nemesis of state sovereignty—the federal government. Under the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act
(DOMA), Virginia has complete authority to deny the privileges and responsibilities of marriage to same-sex partners. But Iowa doesn't have the complete authority to grant them.

And in a slightly related story, halfway across the country in California, the economic recession is prompting (heterosexual) couples to get hitched at the courthouse to save money. As the L.A. Times reports, the over-the-top weddings of the past two decades may be over.

"I didn't need to put on a frilly fairy tale wedding for everybody else," said [one bride in L.A.], who picked up a bouquet from a local florist on her way to the high-rise courthouse. "We really just wanted to get married."

. . .

In L.A. County, civil wedding ceremonies performed in government buildings were up 17% in 2008 over 2007. Nationally, the number of couples marrying in civil, rather than religious, ceremonies in the first quarter of this year increased by 60% over the same period last year.