When Iowa lifted the ban on same-sex marriage, joining the ranks of liberal Massachusetts and Vermont, most people were taken aback. How could Iowa beat California and New York in permitting gay marriage? We weren't surprised. In 2001, as part of the MacArthur Foundation's Network on Transitions to Adulthood, we moved to a small town in northeastern Iowa to chronicle the lives of more than 200 young people coming of age amid a fading factory and farming economy. During our stay, we learned a great deal about why the young and educated flee the state in such dramatic numbers. Looking back, we now wonder: Can gay marriage be a start of what it takes to bring these young people back?
Iowa, it turns out, may be the perfect test case for the gay-marriage debate. Iowans are, above all, pragmatic people. They cherish their way of life, but they also revere fairness and equality. You would be hard-pressed to find Americans more engaged in the civic process and less inclined to get bogged down by the culture war's shout-fests. Although not to be mistaken for California progressive, in the countryside, so long as you follow the rules of local life and are discreet, such intimate choices are tolerated, if not exactly embraced.
But, setting aside the culture wars, could gay marriage provide a way-of-life development boost? Could Iowa need gay marriage? Iowa is hemorrhaging people so fast that since 1980, huge sections of the state have seen their county populations shrink by 10 percent or more. In one of every two rural counties, deaths outnumber births. These trends create a unique dilemma. The place that is held up as the real, more authentic, true America sits on the verge of extinction because in some counties there are no longer enough teachers, doctors and business people to keep the region going. A birth cannot replace what is lost every time a young adult leaves who would have paid taxes, voted, worked and purchased a home. The final death knell sounds for communities when there are not enough children to keep schools open.
As we found in our study, the reasons young people leave the state are many. Some leave for jobs, others because they are hungry to reinvent themselves. Those who leave say Iowa is stuck in the past, isn't diverse enough and is unwelcoming of things that don't fit into the old patterns of life. A few young adults who leave return home, but their reasons for doing so are more personal than professional, and their numbers are not enough to plug the brain drain. Iowa must change if it is to keep its best and brightest.
What is happening in Iowa now could jumpstart the future because a diversity of people and lifestyles often creates the types of jobs that will fuel a 21st-century economy. Best-selling author and professor Richard Florida famously argues that tolerance for homosexuals and other minorities is part of what stimulates big new ideas, cutting-edge industry and regional growth. It is not gayness per se that spurs this change, but the openness to fresh, new ideas that diversity represents. When Massachusetts made gay marriage legal, couples flooded into the state to take advantage of the law. Cape Cod became the Niagara Falls for gay newlyweds, many of whom stayed to live and work in the state.
With gay marriage on the books, Iowa could be rewarded with an influx of creative-class consumers and entrepreneurs eager to exploit the state's many resources. What better way to bring the young and the restless to the prairie than to become a destination for a new generation of homesteaders hungry to re-imagine the New Heartland?