Heather Marie Dunn is a transgender Iowan and “recovering right-winger” in Polk County. -promoted by Laura Belin

To the FAMiLY Leader,

This open letter was inspired by your call for dialogue. As a fellow evangelical Christian who is a transgender woman, I welcome dialogue. I commend Bob Vander Plaats for being willing to sit down with the late Donna Red Wing for coffee.

However, here is why you may be running into resistance from the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates. I can’t speak for them, but I suspect most progressives are hesitant to dialogue with you for the following reasons.

Matt Chapman: Lobbyists tend to disassociate advocating for a bill from the impact of that legislation. I couldn’t disagree more. -promoted by Laura Belin

Spending over two years at the Iowa legislature, watching committee meetings and floor action, I’ve picked up on the theme of decorum. It is necessary when powerful people of different ideology need to come to a consensus. There are times when that divide is too great and the decorum deteriorates. That is usually centered around hot-button topics.

President Ronald Reagan and then House Speaker Tip O’Neill had the six-o-clock rule. It was a designed to put partisan politics aside at the end of the day. They were bitter enemies, yet kept decorum and treated each other as equals. After six o’ clock, policy discussion was ended. They recognized that allowing each other to voice their position was the bedrock of this democracy.

In more recent history, when the debates are over, the debaters tend to go to their own corners.

Matt Chapman: “The need to control women is what this is about, and the rage stems from a perception of impotency, caused by that lack of control.” -promoted by Laura Belin

It was impossible to miss the sea of white the Democratic women of the U.S. House wore to the State of the Union address on Tuesday. It was a nod to the suffragettes, who paved the way to winning the right to vote on August 26, 1920, and a celebration of the record-breaking diversity of the 116th United States Congress sworn in on January 23, 2019, almost one hundred years later.

Yet reminders of how far there still is to go echoed throughout the chamber. While President Donald Trump acknowledged the record-breaking number of women legislators elected, it took a moment for the modern-day suffragettes to stand and applaud. His praise was unwelcome, due to his history of misogyny.

I’m taking a break from the overwhelming amount of discouraging political news to mark a happy anniversary. Eight years ago this week, the Iowa Supreme Court unanimously struck down our state’s Defense of Marriage Act.

I wanted to share highlights from Bleeding Heartland’s coverage of the month that marriage equality became a reality for Iowans.

I suppose it was inevitable that Representative Steve King would insert himself into the national debate over a Kentucky county clerk using her religious beliefs as an excuse not to do her job. King's immediate reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling on marriage equality was to urge states to "just abolish civil marriage, let's go back to holy matrimony the way it began." A couple of weeks later, he introduced a Congressional resolution saying states "may refuse to be bound by the holding in Obergefell v. Hodges" and "are not required to license same-sex marriage or recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states."

This past weekend, King lit up Twitter by saying of the Rowan County clerk who was jailed for refusing to issue marriage licenses,

In 1963, we should not have honored SCOTUS decision to creat a wall of separation between prayer & school. Kim Davis for Rosa Parks Award.

On Tuesday, King doubled down in an interview with KSCJ radio in Sioux City: "Cheers for [Mike] Huckabee and [Ted] Cruz, whoever else has stepped up to defend Kim Davis. I think she deserves the Rosa Parks Award."

Would you believe there was a time when King said calling for county officials to refuse to abide by a Supreme Court ruling on marriage equality was "no solution" in the battle to "protect marriage"?

Today is State Representative Curt Hanson's birthday. Six years ago at this time, he was in the thick of the first state legislative campaign following the Iowa Supreme Court's Varnum v Brien ruling on marriage equality. Hanson's win in a highly competitive House district was probably the second most important special election in recent Iowa history (after Liz Mathis's victory in November 2011, which protected the Democratic Iowa Senate majority).

Kicking off an occasional "throwback Thursday" series, Bleeding Heartland takes a look at Hanson's first campaign for the Iowa House.