Jason Benell lives in Des Moines with his wife and two children. He is a combat veteran, former city council candidate, and president of Iowa Atheists and Freethinkers. This essay first appeared in the fall issue of the 2025 American Atheist Magazine

I am often asked, “Why are you an atheist?” or, “How can you be an atheist?” when engaging with members of the public. Here in Iowa, being an atheist, humanist, or secular person is still seen as an anomaly by a lot of folks, especially well-meaning people who are struggling with many of the actions of our state and federal government. They have grown up with the idea that religiosity is synonymous with morality, and while that is so demonstrably not true upon any short reflection, it remains a social burden nonreligious folks must bear. This is deeply unfair as well as untrue: most human beings do not share the faith of the people here.

This is one of the many reasons that I’m motivated to be an atheist activist.

Wayne Ford represented part of Des Moines in the Iowa House and is the founder of the nonprofit organization Urban Dreams.

Opening scene

During Urban Dreams’ 40th Anniversary Celebration on July 30, 2025, the organization unveiled a commemorative plaque in my honor in the Urban Dreams Community Courtyard on 6th Avenue — the same neighborhood where my journey in Des Moines truly began. This event brought together former and current staff, clients who have benefited from Urban Dreams’ programs, directors past and present, community leaders, elected officials, and other friends from across Iowa.

It was more than just a celebration of my past work; it was a public reaffirmation of my recommitment to Des Moines, the state of Iowa, and the causes that have defined my life.

An updated version of an essay published in 2020.

Connie Belin passed away on June 23, 1980. She was only 49. I was eleven, the youngest of her five children.

I’ve learned a lot from the defining event of my childhood, but it comes down to this: you never stop needing your parents.

Chuck Isenhart is an investigative reporter, photographer and recovering Iowa state legislator offering research, analysis, education and public affairs advocacy at his Substack newsletter Iowa Public Policy Geek, where this essay first appeared.

Never have I ever had the nightmare, much less a daytime phantasm, that a friend of mine could be the victim of a political assassination in the United States of America.

Never have I ever looked to the sky, as I did on Saturday afternoon, admiring three great blue herons over the Mississippi River, which flows from Minnesota to Iowa, then starkly recognize that the majestic birds are flying in “missing man formation.”

Never have I ever met a public servant quite like Melissa Hortman.

Elesha Gayman is a Mom, educator, advocate, Iowan, and American who served in the Iowa House from 2007 through 2010. She has been speaking truth to power since age 14 and writing to change hearts and minds since 2025.

Can you recall a moment in your life when you changed your position on an issue or shifted an opinion you held?

I am not talking about changing your mind on whether to go out to dinner or stay in, but rather a fundamental shift in your beliefs. How did that happen? Was it a massive heart attack or near-death experience that you needed to survive to finally stop smoking or start exercising?

When I challenge myself with these questions, one thing is clear: I am more stubborn than I would like to admit. I don’t make decisions in haste and am very good at sitting on the fence until I get adequate information to formulate a position or opinion. In the Iowa legislature, we often referred to this as “keeping our powder dry.”

Chuck Isenhart is an investigative reporter, photographer and recovering Iowa state legislator offering research, analysis, education and public affairs advocacy at his Substack newsletter Iowa Public Policy Geek, where this essay first appeared.

March 20 was the seventh anniversary of Sonia (Kendrick) Stover’s death, at age 40. The news was a blow to me and others in every way imaginable. The best I could do to mourn her passing was to make a point of personal privilege on the floor of the Iowa House of Representatives, reading a story by Alison Gowans of the Cedar Rapids Gazette, to ensure that others knew of the loss the state had suffered.

Al Charlson is a North Central Iowa farm kid, lifelong Iowan, and retired bank trust officer.

I’m sure many readers can look back at their careers and think of certain years which stand out in red letters. 2008 is one of those years for me.

At that time our bank’s trust department held several commercial buildings in downtown Waverly in a fiduciary relationship. On June 9 I went downtown in my knee-high rubber boots. I was able to get into one of the buildings through the glass side entrance doors. The corner office was rented to a professional group, and I joined them in carrying files upstairs to the mezzanine. 

Every time we went out into the lobby to the stairs the water was a little higher on those glass entrance doors. It was eerie. We worked as long as we could.

Tanya Keith is an activist and small business owner in Des Moines.

I got a text from my oldest, who is currently in college in Massachusetts, asking me to go stand up for trans rights as the state capitol this week. Republicans in the Iowa legislature have proposed through House File 583 and Senate File 418 to strip trans and non-binary people of their civil rights. I wanted to go for my own reasons, but my child asking me to go made it an essential errand for me.

Khayree Duckett is a Mount Pleasant, Iowa native with ties to Republican campaigns and elected officials. He does advocacy work with a national developer, owner, and manager of affordable housing and lives in Carrollton, Texas with his wife and son.

One byproduct of our polarized and fragmented public discourse is that public service rarely produces “giants” of bipartisan acclaim. There was a time when figures like U.S. Senator Bob Dole and U.S. House Speaker Tip O’Neill—partisans to their core—were still respected across the aisle as leaders who could bridge divides.

That era is fading, but Dave Heaton was one of its last practitioners, a statesman who understood that effective governance requires both conviction and compromise.

With his passing this month, Mount Pleasant lost one of its best, and I have lost one of my idols. When describing my high school years, I often joke that I didn’t play football, but I got to practice with the team. As a dorky teenager, politics was my passion instead, and Dave was my mentor from an early age, guiding me as I first got involved—going all the way back to middle school.

On numerous occasions, Dave and I would sit at Dickey’s while he humored my thoughts and opinions on things I knew so little about. We would spend an entire Saturday morning in these discussions while he drank black coffee, and I imagine he held back a few laughs as he watched me attempt to do the same.

Brian Bruening lives in Clayton County and has been involved in Democratic Party leadership since 2017. He is on Bluesky at @iowarural.bsky.social.

When I wrote just under two years ago about my unsuccessful bid for the Iowa House, I affirmed the importance of running as a Democratic candidate in a very red district and said I would do so again. Last fall, I made good on that commitment, and ran for Iowa Senate district 32, with similar results. We ran a lean campaign, raising and spending a little more than $21,000 in a three month span starting from my nomination via special convention in late July through Election Day.

Having long ago given up on expecting much help from the state party beyond a phone call or two and some technical assistance, I relied on local volunteers and county party infrastructure to spread my message. I created and sent out targeted online and streaming ads, sent text messages, direct-to-door mailers, distributed hundreds of signs and banners, filled local airwaves with radio ads, participated anyway I could in local newspapers and TV, and spoke and debated throughout the district.

I focused on issues that directly affected voters in local communities: public education and defunding of the Area Education Agencies, health care, and rural economics, all the most potent issues the Iowa Democratic Party told us to run on. I added water quality issues to my platform, something our Big Ag-beholden state Democratic Party seemingly doesn’t have the stomach to discuss. The end results were as expected: the Republican incumbent held his seat with 64.6 percent of the vote.

Randy Evans is executive director of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that promotes openness and transparency in Iowa’s state and local governments. He can be reached at DMRevans2810@gmail.com. 

I have been kicking myself since being reminded that procrastination comes with a price.

This lesson arrived the week before Christmas when I spotted a small obituary in the Bloomfield Democrat. Seven succinct paragraphs informed readers of the death of Titus Wagler, 66, a longtime Davis County business owner.

In 1997, Wagler and relatives began Midwest Truss Co., a small manufacturing operation whose employees produce wooden trusses for builders in southern Iowa and northern Missouri.

For several years, I had been promising myself, and Titus, that I would drop by “soon” for coffee and conversation. Unfortunately, “soon” kept getting delayed—because of work, because of the weather, because of other distractions … because … because … because.

Kurt Meyer writes a weekly column for the Nora Springs – Rockford Register and the Substack newsletter Showing Up, where this essay first appeared. He served as chair of the executive committee (the equivalent of board chair) of Americans for Democratic Action, America’s most experienced liberal organization.

There once was a time, now no longer true for Democrats, when if Iowans wanted to see, meet, probably visit with a candidate seeking to become president of the United States, you could. It wasn’t especially difficult. They came around, perhaps to your county, certainly to your region… and spoke, took questions, engaged with potential voters. For maybe a four-month period every four or eight years, presidential aspirants were about as accessible as U.S. Senate or U.S. House candidates.

As many have noted, this is largely because of a certain presidential campaign in 1976.

This is my way of introducing that, over the years, I had numerous small encounters with the late President Jimmy Carter. I chuckle at the thought, in part because in his presidential campaigns, I was never a staunch Carter supporter.

For many Iowans, myself included, Jimmy Carter’s recent death brings forth a fresh wave of memories.

Kurt Meyer writes a weekly column for the Nora Springs – Rockford Register and the Substack newsletter Showing Up, where this essay (originally published in two parts) first appeared. He served as chair of the executive committee (the equivalent of board chair) of Americans for Democratic Action, America’s most experienced liberal organization.

It seems I lucked out. I don’t know what the statute of limitations is on the illegal sale of raw milk, but I’m about to make a confession. If my violation is so heinous that I simply cannot “run out the clock” on this and enforcement is still possible after five-plus decades, then I’m in big trouble.

My confession: I was part of what, in retrospect, can only be called a raw-milk “syndicate” for maybe five years in my mid-to-late teens. Co-conspirators were my parents and at least one brother, my back-up milker, who always seemed somewhat less helpful than I wished. My customers, beneficiaries of my crime ring, were nearby farm families, plus a thirsty household in Mona, and two guys Dad worked with at the plant… Hormel’s in Austin, Minnesota.

Yeah, we smuggled contraband raw milk across state lines.

Bernie Scolaro is a retired school counselor, a past president of the Sioux City Education Association, and former Sioux City school board member.

I would park around the corner and wait until there was no traffic, no sign of people, before getting out and swiftly entering the bar in Sioux City, Iowa. It was the 1980s, and entering and leaving Three Cheers (the only gay bar in town) without being noticed was always a challenge. I felt the stigma of having to hide who I was, deny myself, not knowing who would approve or disapprove, or what the backlash might be if I were exposed.

At some point in my life, I came to a crossroads. I realized not only that I had to be true to myself, but also that I needed to let others know and accept me. While took too long, I eventually realized that I had another responsibility as well: to show others it’s okay if you are gay and love whom you love. I realized that being open helped others accept themselves and/or their family members who were struggling with their identity.

Earlier this week, I went to dinner. I was wearing RAYGUN’s “Iowa for Kamala” t-shirt while my partner wore RAYGUN’s “Mind your own damn business” t-shirt. 

Douglas Burns is a fourth-generation Iowa journalist. He is the co-founder of the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation and a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative, where this article first appeared on The Iowa Mercury newsletter. His family operated the Carroll Times Herald for 93 years in Carroll, Iowa where Burns resides.

There’s not supposed to be any crying in politics.

Only sometimes there is. My own tears, even.

Iowa Democratic Congressional candidate Lanon Baccam, born in Mount Pleasant and raised by his immigrant parents, spent part of a summer speech talking about the Iowa of our youth when this state soared. Immigrants and blended families were embraced. Vision and kindness and big-heartedness prevailed in the state under Governor Robert Ray as we absorbed abandoned kids and refugees fleeing violence.

At one point Baccam motioned to me in the audience.

“I’m looking at Doug Burns right now, because his family looks like my family,” Baccam said during a speech to the Iowa Farmers Union in Elkhart, rural Polk County.

Kentin Waits is a writer and small business owner living in Des Moines. His work has appeared in Inc., Christian Science Monitor, U.S. Airways Magazine, and Kiplinger. 

If the thought of a stranger using your loved one’s cemetery plot as a campsite upsets you, proceed with caution.

In late July, I checked Facebook postings from my hometown of Knoxville, Iowa. On Wednesday, July 24, the community of 7,500 hosted an estimated 18,000 RAGBRAI riders overnight. I was curious to see the turnout and marvel at the willpower of those fit enough to participate in this two-wheeled endurance test.

Various threads began to mention that the city had quickly run out of available green space for campsites. The decision was made to open a section of Graceland Cemetery for the night (an empty hayfield and future site of the new Graceland Chapel). The lot abuts the historic cemetery and is separated only by a small lane that’s not open to traffic.

Tim Nelson is a Des Moines-based campaign staffer.

The Des Moines City Council will hold an emergency meeting on July 22 to decide whether or not to criminalize homelessness in the city.

The ordinance would allow the city to fine homeless people for sleeping in public spaces and would allow the city to get rid of what little property these people have faster.

As someone who has experienced homelessness, I find this ordinance cruel and ineffective.

Photo of Caitlin Clark first published on the University of Iowa’s Hawkeye Sports website in 2023.

Bernie Scolaro is a retired school counselor, a past president of the Sioux City Education Association, and former Sioux City school board member.

I am one of those snowbirds from Iowa residing in South Carolina. I happily cheered on Caitlin Clark and the Iowa women’s basketball team throughout the NCAA Final Four tournament. While my Carolinian friends cheered for their Gamecocks, they nonetheless enjoyed and admired the ride the Hawkeyes provided for myself, the state of Iowa, and actually, most of the nation. 

Photos by Bruce Lear, published with permission

Bruce Lear lives in Sioux City and has been connected to Iowa’s public schools for 38 years. He taught for eleven years and represented educators as an Iowa State Education Association regional director for 27 years until retiring. He can be reached at BruceLear2419@gmail.com  

There’s a learning curve for every change. How sharp the curve is depends on the speed of the change. The journey from Iowa snowbound to Florida snowbird was abrupt but welcome.

We bought a small place in the land of alligators and golf carts and headed South a day after the last January blizzard. Here are a few lessons from our snowbird education.

Amy Endle began her career in Iowa and has been a school psychologist with an Area Education Agency since 2012. She emailed the message enclosed below to all members of the Iowa House and Senate on March 23.

Dear Iowa Legislators 

I hope this message finds you well. I am writing to inform you of my family’s difficult decision to leave Iowa after 12 years of residency and return to our native Wisconsin. I have proudly served Iowa children, parents, and schools as a school psychologist since moving to Iowa in 2012. 

This decision was not made lightly and is driven by concerns directly impacting our livelihood and the educational future of our 3 children. The core reason for our departure stems from the increasing insecurity surrounding the sustainability of a gutted Area Education Agency (AEA) system. The knee-jerk decisions passed by legislators more interested in pleasing the governor than serving children in Iowa have not only affected the professional stability of highly trained education specialists, but have also cast a shadow over my family’s future in Iowa.

Lanon Baccam is a combat veteran, former USDA official, and candidate for Iowa’s third Congressional district.

On this International Women’s Day I’m thinking about the nine incredible women in my life. My wife, three mothers-in-law, four sisters, and my mom—Bounmy Baccam—the bravest, most loving, and generous woman I know.

My family’s story traces back to Laos and is deeply impacted by the Vietnam War. A conflict so violent that to this day Laos maintains a notorious distinction of being the most bombed nation on earth. Two million tons of ordnance were dropped on Laos—the equivalent of an entire planeload of bombs every 8 minutes, 24 hours a day, for 9 years on an area the size of Oregon.

Shutterstock image of an angiogram is by April stock

Rick Morain is the former publisher and owner of the Jefferson Herald, for which he writes a regular column.

I had a heart attack on the evening of February 27. All is well.

Tuesday about 7 p.m. I was sitting at the press table at the Jefferson City Council meeting, taking notes, when my chest started to hurt. I figured it was probably acid reflux, which I have from time to time, so I waited for it to go away.

It didn’t. It hung around after the meeting adjourned at 8 p.m., so when I got home I told Kathy that if it didn’t disappear by 9:30, I would go out to the emergency room at Greene County Medical Center to have it checked out.

I am speaking out to educate our communities and give voice to thousands of families across the state who are begging our Iowa legislators to stop the Area Education Agency (AEA) education reform bill from being passed into law during the 2024 legislative session.

Having spent years building my professional experience in effective health care transformation, performance and process improvement in large systems, I know we are not doing this the right way. We are not taking time to perform a credible and thorough study to determine what reform is needed before enacting a bill. A change of this magnitude cannot be rushed, or it will inevitably fail. The risk is too high to gamble on our children’s well-being and their futures. 

Any harm to our children as a result of the decisions made this legislative session will never be forgiven, nor forgotten. Our integrated AEA system works and is a national treasure. Many states aspire to implement a system like we have, and my personal story demonstrates that our system works. 

Alexandra Dermody is a Davenport-based Gen Z community advocate, nonprofit director, and small business owner.

The experience of transgender Americans is fraught with difficulty, particularly for trans women of color, who are disproportionately targeted for violence and prejudice. Startling data from the Trans Murder Monitoring project exposes a disturbingly high number of murders of transgender individuals worldwide, with a notable portion occurring in the United States.

This violence is not haphazard but rather a direct result of pervasive discrimination present in all aspects of society—from employment opportunities to inadequate health care access. These are not isolated occurrences, but rather symptomatic of a larger societal issue that systematically deprives transgender individuals of their basic rights and humanity.

Dave Leshtz is the editor of The Prairie Progressive.

The first sentence of Tim Kraft’s obituary in the Albuquerque newspapers last month labeled him as the manager of Jimmy Carter’s 1976 Iowa caucus campaign and, later, “a top aide to President Carter.”

Not a bad legacy for a kid from Noblesville, Indiana. It gives a hint of the extraordinary, suggesting that the deceased man was smart, talented, and deserving of recognition for helping to elevate a nationally unknown politician and farmer from the South to the presidency.

For those of us who have worked the caucuses or on campaigns, we know just how remarkable of a feat that was—and why, almost 50 years later, it’s worth the lede in his obituary. We also know just how far out of the norm it is for the person who orchestrated that win to be so humble and down to earth.

Phil Specht is a retired farmer and a father who also lost a son. He wrote this poem on February 9, 2024, as a “deeply personal response to a very public mistreatment” of President Joe Biden, first by Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report and then by the press.

How Dare You Ask The Date My Son Died

I could not tell you.

A black cloud obscured the calendar.

Was it a Monday?

I do not know.

My five-year effort to gain a seat on the Iowa House press bench ended less than five days after the Institute for Free Speech filed a federal lawsuit on my behalf.

House Chief Clerk Meghan Nelson informed me shortly after 5:00 pm on January 23 that the Iowa House approved my application for work space, and a spot has been reserved for me in the press box on the floor of the House chamber.

Photo by Julie Gammack of an Iowa Democratic caucus on the south side of Des Moines, January 15, 2024. Published with permission.

Kurt Meyer writes a weekly column for the Nora Springs – Rockford Register and the Substack newsletter Showing Up, where this essay first appeared. He serves as chair of the executive committee (the equivalent of board chair) of Americans for Democratic Action, America’s most experienced liberal organization.

The Facebook message came in late Monday morning. “Just wondering if you are going to your caucus tonight. I’m worried that there will only be a few people there. Nobody seems interested this year in the Dem caucus.”

My friend, who lives 200 miles distant, began this exchange by noting a recent column I had written. I respond, “Yes, you bet I’m going. Sometimes we send important messages simply by showing up, which is why I named my column such.” 

Dan Piller was a business reporter for more than four decades, working for the Des Moines Register and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He covered the oil and gas industry while in Texas and was the Register’s agriculture reporter before his retirement in 2013. He lives in Ankeny.

Nikki Haley needed an entire day to admit, rather furtively, that slavery was a possible cause of the Civil War. Donald Trump thinks that the bloody struggle from 1861-65 (which Trump, in a rare burst of accuracy, described as “very rough time”) happened because Abraham Lincoln was born too soon to read the “Art of the Deal.” Had the Great Emancipator been so fortunate, Trump said in Newton on January 6, “you probably wouldn’t even know who Abraham Lincoln was.”

Iowans whose knowledge of the Civil War goes slightly beyond Ken Burns’ PBS series three decades ago are shaking their heads in wonderment at such ignorance. But history is as much a vantage point than an absolute certainty. I learned that lesson in September, 1963, and the first days of classes in my junior year at Lincoln High School in the Nebraska capitol city.

Joan Martila is a retired Mississippi Bend Area Education Agency audiologist. She is a former president of the Iowa Speech Language Hearing Association as well as a former president of the Iowa Speech Language Hearing Foundation. 

Another election year is upon us. I can guess what you’re thinking, because I have heard others say it: Why do Iowa Democrats have so many losers running of office? 

I am one of those losers. Let me tell you my side of the story.

AJ Jones is a writer. She is a creator of art and expresses herself across different mediums. She embraces her neurodivergence as a unique way to view the world and create a better future.

Domestic Violence Awareness Month is always difficult and one of remembrance. I remember the last conversation I had with Linda, a friend from work. She told me how her husband had tied her up and locked her in the downstairs bathroom of the house for several hours. How he had threatened her with a knife and how he had previously threatened her with a gun. 

You can imagine how that conversation went. I often wonder if my advice was sound.  

Henry Jay Karp is the Rabbi Emeritus of Temple Emanuel in Davenport, Iowa, which he served from 1985 to 2017. He is the co-founder and co-convener of One Human Family QCA, a social justice organization. In this photo from 2001, he is standing in front of a salt rock in the Negev (southern Israel).

A death toll of over 2,800 and growing. Some 150 Israelis—men, women, children, the elderly—held hostage in Gaza by the terrorist organization Hamas. Entire families massacred. Bodies of dead babies. Israel is in a struggle to the death with its blood enemy, Hamas.

Being a New Yorker born and bred, I must admit that I never felt the need to fly until, as a college graduate, I joined my classmates as we boarded a flight to Israel, bound for our first year of rabbinic study in Jerusalem. It did not take long before I fell in love with the 4,000-year-old homeland of my people. Since then, I have journeyed there several times.  It is my home away from home; second in my heart only to my beloved U.S.A.

As a lover of Israel, I can attest that these days a heavy cloud hangs over the Jewish people, not only in Israel but around the world. It’s a cloud of anguish, violence, fear, death, and profound grief, born of the recent Hamas attacks waged against the Israeli towns and villages on Israel’s southern border, along with the ongoing barrage of missiles fired by Hamas, targeting civilian populations as far away from Gaza as Tel Aviv. The pain of Jews is very real and very raw, as there is hardly a Jewish household, inside and outside of Israel, untouched by a personal loss because of this, the greatest mass murder and hostage taking of Jews since the Holocaust.

Dr. Greg Cohen has practiced medicine in Chariton since 1994 and is vice president of the American College of Osteopathic Family Physicians. He was named the Rural Health Champion by the Iowa Rural Health Association in 2014 and was awarded the Living Doc Hollywood Award for National Rural Health day in 2015. He was named a Distinguished Fellow by the American College of Osteopathic Family Physicians as well as Physician of the Year by the Iowa Osteopathic Medical Association in 2019.

Dr. Cohen’s first commentary about the COVID-19 pandemic is one of the most-viewed Bleeding Heartland posts in the sixteen-year history of this website.

Three years ago, I wrote a letter to the editor about my experiences as a rural physician six months into the COVID-19 Pandemic. There was no vaccine, no Paxlovid, and only experimental treatments for patients sick enough to be hospitalized. About 180,000 Americans had died. I had not hugged my children or grandson in nearly six months, and in my recurring dreams, I was suffocating in an ICU bed. (I finally hugged my children seven months later, after we had all been vaccinated.)

Dave Leshtz is the editor of The Prairie Progressive. The Hamburg Inn eventually reopened under new leadership. Original post follows.

228 E. Bloomington Street in Iowa City was a battered old duplex across the street from Tweedy’s grocery store, the future site of Pagliai’s Pizza. The elderly landlady lived in one half of the duplex. I lived in the other half with a married couple and their baby, plus whoever needed a bed for the night or the week or the month. 

A block south on Linn Street was the Hamburg Inn #2. The year was 1967, and the Burg was in its pre-caucuses heyday. I ate breakfast, lunch, or dinner there almost every day.

The customers were vividly eclectic: hungover fraternity brothers, young couples who obviously had spent the night together, lawyers with nearby offices, small-time gamblers, alcoholics who had trouble lifting that first cup of coffee to their lips without spilling, poets, and house painters.

Bruce Lear lives in Sioux City and has been connected to Iowa’s public schools for 38 years. He taught for eleven years and represented educators as an Iowa State Education Association regional director for 27 years until retiring. He took the photo above of Shellsburg School (now Vinton-Shellsburg).

Teachers have earned appreciation for more than a week in May or during tragedies like school shootings or a pandemic. They really do train all other professions.  

People who boast about pulling themselves up with their bootstraps have short memories. If I tried to pull myself up with my own bootstraps, they would have broken, and my boots would have remained firmly on the floor. No, in my tiny school in my tiny town, I had some dedicated motivators called teachers.

Tracy Jones is a progressive political activist in Davenport. These comments are a longer version of testimony she delivered at an Iowa House public hearing on July 11 (see video below). She is pictured here on the left, speaking to State Representative Luana Stoltenberg.

In the spring of 1972, my mom was a pregnant 32-year-old with three young children. My sister was eleven years old, my brother was eight, and I was fifteen months old. Our mom had just experienced the collapse of her second marriage, and her pregnancy was not my dad’s.

I can only imagine the shame, fear and guilt that must have clung to her. Our mom was raised in a conservative and religious household. I’m certain an abortion wasn’t the first thing on her mind, but she knew her medical history. She had difficult pregnancies and suffered from severe preeclampsia with each.

As the pregnancy progressed, it became clear that this would be the pregnancy that would kill her. She needed an abortion but was living in a state where it wasn’t legal.

Bleeding Heartland user PrairieFan is an Iowa landowner.

My boxelder trees look horrible.

The foliage on the outer branches is a sickly pale green. The leaves are twisted and stunted. Looking at other plants near my house, I see cupped and contorted leaves on trees, vines, and wildflowers. As happens every year, farm chemicals have trespassed (drifted) onto my conservation land.

Iowans who don’t know what it is like to live near typical corn and soybean fields might guess that farm-chem trespass would be a very occasional accident, followed by apologies, handshakes, and maybe a “sorry” gift. But that is not how it works in much of rural Iowa. 

Larry Osweiler grew up in Keota, Iowa and now lives in Indiana. A graduate of the University of Iowa, he is an aficionado of Iowa treats found nowhere else: Pagliai’s Pizza, Sterzing Potato Chips, Maid-Rite’s, and kolaches from anywhere close to Cedar Rapids.

I got interested in Iowa politics in 1964 at the age of 8, when Governor Harold Hughes was running for re-election. I had sent for a picture of the governor and received a package from his office a few weeks later. I remember showing it to everyone on the school bus.

While waiting on the bus one afternoon, I remember Evan Hultman riding by on the back of a convertible with a Hultman for Governor sign on it. Hughes won with 68 percent of the vote. Hard to believe there was once a day when a Democrat would win a statewide race in Iowa by that large a margin.

I studied the book I’d received and memorized almost every state official. John Schmidhauser was elected to Congress from the first district. At our dinner table that election night, I wondered how my dad was so sure Lyndon Johnson was going to win the presidential election.

Writing under the handle “Bronxiniowa,” Ira Lacher, who actually hails from the Bronx, New York, is a longtime journalism, marketing, and public relations professional.

My aunt, who raised me after my parents died, would wake up early on Sunday to prepare a meal, then take a cab, at great expense, to visit her sister, confined to a mental institution. “If she were Catholic,” one of the nurses in the ward told me, “she would be a saint.”

But she also threw around the word “shvartze” to refer to black people. “Shvartze” technically means “black” in Yiddish, but it’s also the equivalent of the N-word. So, yes, my aunt was a racist. But she also did good for me, her sister, and uncounted others. And I still say a memorial prayer for her on the anniversary of her death.

No such sentiment may be forthcoming for Scott Adams, the longtime cartoonist who created “Dilbert.”

Deb VanderGaast is a registered nurse and child care advocate seeking to advance state and national child care and disability policy, inclusive child care practices and improve access to quality, affordable child care for working parents. She was the 2022 Democratic nominee in Iowa Senate district 41.

The LGBTQ+ community in Iowa is under attack, and so are our schools. Many people think the acceptance of queer people in our culture is causing an increase in transgender and queer kids. They think exposure to transgender and queer people in education, books, movies, music, and the community is “grooming” kids to question their gender and sexual identity.

They are completely wrong.

Adolescence is a time when kids form their identities and “try on” various roles as they explore who they are and who they want to be. Our society now allows many more options as acceptable choices for youth to consider, but this increased acceptance has not changed who kids are becoming. Rather, it has allowed adolescents to safely express who they already are. They are no longer constrained by social biases against gay and transgender people.