Research 2000’s latest Iowa poll for KCCI-TV contains good news for supporters of marriage equality. The survey asked, “Now that more than a year has gone by since the Iowa Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage, do you favor or oppose marriage rights for same-sex couples?” 53 percent respondents said they favor those rights, 41 percent opposed them and 6 percent were unsure.

I haven’t seen the full poll results, showing support for same-sex marriage rights among men, women, Democrats, Republicans and independents. I will update this post with a link to the cross-tabs when I find them. Bryan English of the Iowa Family Policy Center told KCCI he didn’t think the poll was representative of Iowans’ views, but several other statewide polls have shown that the majority of Iowans are not eager to overturn marriage equality. As time passes, public acceptance should increase if the experience of Vermont and Massachusetts are guides.

The KCCI poll also found that 62 percent of respondents support legalizing medical marijuana in Iowa, 33 percent oppose doing so and 5 percent are unsure.

Getting back to the same-sex marriage issue, I give huge credit to the Libertarian candidate for Iowa governor, Eric Cooper. On Thursday he made the case for tolerance while speaking to the Ames Conservative Breakfast Club.

Here’s my rough transcript of the first part of this clip:

You know who the Pilgrims were? The Pilgrims were a group of people in England, and everybody in England hated their guts. And you know what they did? They came to America to live here. And the reason–they came here because we were the land of the free. We started the land of the free. That is, even if everyone in surrounding society hates your guts, in America as long as you’re not hurting other people and their property, you can live the way that you want, as long as you’re being peaceful.

To me, that’s the most American story there is. If you’re a peaceful person who’s not hurting other people, you get to live your life according to your cultural traditions. OK, well, guess what? There are some homosexuals in America today, and to me, they’re the Pilgrims, ok? Surrounding society doesn’t like ’em very much, but you know what? What America is, is you get to live the way that you want to live. And if their cultural tradition is that they can get married, I think that’s America, to allow them to follow that cultural tradition. No, I don’t think that’s [unintelligible] surrounding society as a whole, and I think if we’re gonna restrict that, we’re not America anymore, we’re England, ok? And we’re better than England, we’re America.

Now people say, “Well shouldn’t we be allowed to vote on marriage and what marriage means in the state of Iowa?” Well, yeah, legally, there are mechanisms by which a sufficiently large supermajority can persecute any minority they want. Yes, legally, we could all vote to persecute the Pilgrims if we wanted to and yeah, legally, we could all vote to say, you know, gay people shouldn’t be allowed to marry if we want to. But that’s not America anymore, ok?

Cooper’s a bit off on the history. The Pilgrims were far from laid-back and accepting of other people’s traditions. In fact, “New England Puritans, long viewed as a persecuted group in England, were the least tolerant of other faiths.” But I cut Cooper slack. He’s a neuroscientist, not a historian, and what he did took guts.

You’d expect a Libertarian addressing a Republican group to focus on likely areas of agreement: reducing taxes and the size of government. Instead of just preaching to the choir, Cooper challenged his audience to think about a charged issue differently. He had to know that most people at that breakfast club oppose what the Iowa Supreme Court did.

Post any thoughts on same-sex marriage in Iowa in this thread. The Des Moines Register reports that Iowa’s leading gay wedding planner may star in a television “docu-reality series” about his work. Beau Fodor created Gay Weddings With Panache soon after the Varnum v Brien decision was announced last year.

UPDATE: On Sunday the Des Moines Register published results from a Selzer and Co. Iowa poll of 501 likely Iowa Republican primary voters, which was in the field from June 1 through June 3. The survey included several questions about gay marriage. About 77 percent of likely GOP primary voters agreed that “Iowans should have a chance to vote on changing the constitution to specifically ban gay marriage,” but 20 percent disagreed with that statement. Meanwhile, only 50 percent of likely GOP primary voters agreed that “Iowans should vote to remove current Supreme Court justices from their office because of their decision on gay marriage.” About 45 percent disagreed with that statement. Regarding the statement, “Some Iowans have overreacted to this issue, and having gay marriage in Iowa is just not that big a deal,” 35 percent of likely Republican primary voters agreed, while 62 percent disagreed. I find those numbers encouraging.

The day after Rand Paul won the Republican primary for U.S. Senate in Kentucky, his views on civil rights legislation sparked a media feeding frenzy so intense that Paul became only the third guest in recent history to cancel a scheduled appearance on “Meet the Press.”

Several prominent Republicans, including Iowa’s Senator Chuck Grassley, have distanced themselves from Paul’s ideas about whether the government should be able to bar discrimination by private businesses. Paul walked back his comments on civil rights too.

I contacted the campaign of Iowa’s Libertarian candidate for governor, Eric Cooper, to get his take on Paul’s remarks and government regulation of businesses in general. Cooper’s responses are after the jump.

The Libertarian Party of Iowa convened on April 24 to nominate several candidates for statewide offices. The Libertarian candidate for governor is Eric Cooper, a neuroscience expert in the Iowa State University Psychology department. In his speech to the delegates, Cooper said frankly that the Libertarian Party had not been effective in the past. He laid out a “10 percent strategy” for Libertarians to “get everything we want without ever winning an election.” You can watch Cooper’s whole speech here, but I posted a rough transcript of some interesting parts after the jump.

On the whole, Americans rejected minor presidential candidates. The nationwide popular vote stands at 66.3 million for Barack Obama (52.7 percent) and 58.0 million for John McCain (46.0 percent).

Out of curiosity, tremayne at Open Left reviewed the vote tallies for other presidential candidates:

530,200 votes: Ralph Nader

519,800 votes: Bob Barr

179,900 votes: Chuck Baldwin

147,600 votes: Cynthia McKinney

 30,800 votes: Alan Keyes (in CA)

 28,300 votes: Write-in/other

 10,500 votes: Ron Paul (in MT)

The Iowa Secretary of State’s office does not yet have the general election results on its website, and the Des Moines Register’s election results page only gives the numbers for Obama and McCain, but wikipedia gives these vote counts for Iowa:

818,240: Barack Obama

677,508: John McCain

7,963: Ralph Nader

4,608: Bob Barr

4,403: Chuck Baldwin

1,495: Cynthia McKinney

I am surprised that Nader got so many votes. That’s a lot less than he received in 2000 but at least 60,000 more votes nationwide than he received in 2004.

I also find it interesting that nationally, Bob Barr got three times as many votes as Chuck Baldwin, even though Ron Paul endorsed Baldwin. Maybe the “brand name” of the Libertarian Party is stronger than that of the Constitution Party, or maybe Barr just has more name recognition because of his prominent role in the Bill Clinton impeachment hearings.

In Iowa, Baldwin and Barr received approximately the same number of votes.

If any Bleeding Heartland readers have contacts in the Ron Paul for president crowd, please post a comment and let us know how the activists split among McCain, Barr and Baldwin.

UPDATE: A Bleeding Heartland reader compiled all the county results from Iowa and noticed something strange about Dubuque County. As he commented at Swing State Project, Dubuque County showed

quite a few votes for third party candidates and in some instances (La Riva/Moses) more than in the whole rest of Iowa.

I suspect there’s either something wrong with those numbers or they had some strange butterfly ballot.

Did anyone out there vote in Dubuque County, and if so, was the ballot design strange in some way that would produce an unusually high number of minor-party votes for president?

A few weeks ago I read that Ron Paul was not endorsing any presidential candidate but was urging his supporters to vote for the third-party candidate of their choice–anyone but Barack Obama or John McCain.

However, this week Paul endorsed Constitution Party candidate Chuck Baldwin. The Wall Street Journal blog pointed me toward this letter from Paul to supporters, which contains a bit of a rebuke to Libertarian candidate Bob Barr:

The Libertarian Party Candidate admonished me for “remaining neutral” in the presidential race and not stating whom I will vote for in November.   It’s true; I have done exactly that due to my respect and friendship and support from both the Constitution and Libertarian Party members.  I remain a lifetime member of the Libertarian Party and I’m a ten-term Republican Congressman.  It is not against the law to participate in more then one political party.  Chuck Baldwin has been a friend and was an active supporter in the presidential campaign.

I continue to wish the Libertarian and Constitution Parties well.  The more votes they get, the better.  I have attended Libertarian Party conventions frequently over the years.

In some states, one can be on the ballots of two parties, as they can in New York.  This is good and attacks the monopoly control of politics by Republicans and Democrats.  We need more states to permit this option.  This will be a good project for the Campaign for Liberty, along with the alliance we are building to change the process.

I’ve thought about the unsolicited advice from the Libertarian Party candidate, and he has convinced me to reject my neutral stance in the November election.  I’m supporting Chuck Baldwin, the Constitution Party candidate.

When you think about what an insiders’ club Congress is, it’s amazing that Paul (still a Republican Congressman from Texas) did not endorse his former colleague Barr, who represented Georgia for many years in the House. Barr has denounced the Republican Party for embracing big government and not insisting that the president abide by the law.

The big question for me is whether Paul’s endorsement of Baldwin will cut into Barr’s support in some of the key swing states. I’ve argued before that Barr could tip Nevada to Obama, but ProgressiveSouth writes that Barr could also be a factor in North Carolina.

Anyone out there know any Ron Paul voters or caucus-goers? Will they settle for McCain, sit out the election or vote for a third-party alternative?

For the record, nine presidential candidates will appear on the Iowa ballot, including Baldwin and Barr.

The Nevada Republican Party didn’t want to take that chance. They canceled their state convention, set for next Saturday, because the number of RSVPs from delegates was well below the level needed for a quorum.

This was the second attempt to hold the Nevada GOP convention. State party officials abruptly ended the originally scheduled event in April when Ron Paul supporters outnumbered supporters of John McCain among the delegates.

Nevada is in my opinion the state most likely to go Democratic thanks to Libertarian presidential candidate and former Republican Congressman Bob Barr. Not only are there huge numbers of Ron Paul supporters who don’t back McCain, there is a relevant history. The Libertarian vote in the 1998 Senate race was large enough to hand a narrow victory to Democrat Harry Reid.

Speaking of Barr, he showed up at the liberal Netroots Nation gathering today. Daily Kos user dday landed an impromptu interview and put up this entertaining diary about it.

Scout Finch put up a link to this article about Bob Barr announcing his presidential candidacy:

He first must win the Libertarian nomination at the party’s national convention that begins May 22. Party officials consider him a front-runner thanks to the national profile he developed as a Georgia congressman from 1995 to 2003.

Barr, 59, helped lead Bill Clinton’s impeachment. He quit the Republican Party two years ago, saying he had grown disillusioned with its failure to shrink government and its willingness to scale back civil liberties in fighting terrorism.

I despised Barr during the 1990s, and I still think impeaching Clinton was an abuse of the process intended to punish presidential “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

But I have to admit that he has shown a sincere belief in conservative principles during the past few years. Read this article about the reception he got at the February 2006 Conservative Political Action Conference:

“Are we losing our lodestar, which is the Bill of Rights?” Barr beseeched the several hundred conservatives at the Omni Shoreham in Woodley Park. “Are we in danger of putting allegiance to party ahead of allegiance to principle?”

Barr answered in the affirmative. “Do we truly remain a society that believes that . . . every president must abide by the law of this country?” he posed. “I, as a conservative, say yes. I hope you as conservatives say yes.”

But nobody said anything in the deathly quiet audience. Barr merited only polite applause when he finished, and one man, Richard Sorcinelli, booed him loudly. “I can’t believe I’m in a conservative hall listening to him say [Bush] is off course trying to defend the United States,” Sorcinelli fumed.

Even if he only gets a percent or two of the vote, Barr could throw some states to Barack Obama this November.

John McCain still has problems with some elements of the conservative base, including libertarians who voted for Ron Paul in the primaries. In a few states, such as Nevada, Paul outpolled McCain in the GOP primaries.

Neiaprogressive noted that Paul got 8 percent of the vote in the Indiana and North Carolina GOP primaries last week. That’s after he received nearly 16 percent of the vote in the Pennsylvania primary.

It will be interesting to see if the beltway media give Barr more coverage than a minor-party presidential candidate would usually receive. He was an important figure in Washington for many years.