An editor said: “Isn’t that a stereotype?” After I had written: “While the church ladies quilt and the men shoot outside, other business gets done over coffee. They do not declare victory and rest.”
I know men who will crawl on their bellies through frozen farm fields stalking a Canada goose about to get blasted. And plenty of others less ambitious who just lie there waiting for them to fly over from the nearby sewage lagoons.
They are real. Nearly all I know are perfectly okay with assault rifles for recreation.
Then there are the church ladies. They quilt in Varina (pop. 68) to honor families of police and military, and regularly found the embrace of former Rep. Steve King, a Republican from down the road in Kiron (pop. 321). It’s not what the quilts are about, but politics is in the air. They got started at St. Columbkille’s Parish Hall. The church since has closed but they keep on.
Or it could be St. Joe, where crosses were planted in the church lawn to remember the babies lost to abortion. The Kossuth County hamlet voted solid Democrat until 1990, when Republican Tom Tauke bettered Sen. Tom Harkin there almost singularly over the abortion issue.
They are all real people with real opinions that they share with the likes of Steve King. They vote. It’s how politics gets done in these villages that might as well be on the digital-opinion factory editor’s moon. It’s how the US Supreme Court and Iowa Supreme Court got stacked with justices who, within a week of each other, flipped precedent into the ditch and declared there is no right to abortion under the state or federal constitutions.
Coincidence? Not. It’s the culmination of a 50-year campaign to organize rural people through the church. Morton Blackwell, who helped Jerry Falwell launch the Moral Majority, described it as harvesting the last virgin timber: evangelicals. The politics start in the pews and at the gun club. It spreads from there. If you cannot imagine a town of 68 people, you might not be able to appreciate how things get done around here.
Roe v. Wade galvanized evangelicals and Catholics, previously suspicious of each other, into a powerful political partnership that flourishes today. Iowa Right to Life has become one of the most influential outfits in Des Moines alongside the Iowa Farm Bureau and the Association of Business and Industry.
Somehow there is this disconnect of people who do not share the same experience. Reality takes on caricature. When you look at a quilting lady as if she were a black and white photo, you cannot see that she has deeply rooted convictions about life that are reinforced at the pulpit in the morning, at coffee in the afternoon, and on AM radio all day long.
The result?
In 2010, three Iowa Supreme Court justices were ousted when outside money funneled by Bob Vander Plaats and Family Leader staged a campaign to defeat them for ruling that the state cannot discriminate against homosexuals as a class. Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) is about to appoint her fifth justice from a list of just five applicants.
That was the same year the US Supreme Court handed down Citizens United (corporations are people and money is speech) that opened the floodgates to unbridled purchase of our political and judicial systems, and Heller (the right to bear arms extends to individuals, and now in Iowa you can carry a concealed weapon in the courthouse without a permit). It also was the year of the Tea Party revolution funded by those groups spawned by Blackwell & Friends (setting up Mitch McConnell and his errand boy, Chuck Grassley, to stack the courts).
The cloud-seeding from Virginia worked. The ground was fertile in Iowa, with a large number of Catholics, Missouri Synod Lutherans and evangelicals in tiny white wooden churches along blacktop roads where the political gospel was handed down. The dogma of freedom for guns was filtered through groups like the Iowa Firearms Coalition. Farmers who wanted the government off their backs bought in to the theology of no regulation (while still expecting a crop insurance subsidy) peddled by the Farm Bureau.
The network worked assiduously the past 50 years building a media echo chamber, winning statehouse races over guns and abortion, and securing state and federal judicial systems. Now, no Democratic Iowa senator lives west of Interstate 35. The gun lobby took out Democratic Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal of Council Bluffs in 2016. The Democrats have been wandering wounded since.
The Iowa Supreme Court has repeatedly bleated since 2016 that it wants nothing to do with regulating Iowa’s biggest enterprise and polluter: agribusiness. Ironic that a couple weeks after the abortion rulings the U.S. and Iowa high courts each restricted the ability to regulate pollution.
Former justices and appellate attorneys have lamented to me how politicized the Iowa court has become. They’re still reeling.
Democrats wrote off rural believers as Bible thumpers clinging to their guns. The electoral consequences are felt as liberty is left to the legislative meatgrinder.
You could see it coming like a thunderstorm rolling in from Nebraska. You could hear it if you listened here in the land of tall corn and quaint misimpression.
Art Cullen is editor of The Storm Lake Times Pilot in northwest Iowa (stormlake.com). He won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 2017 and is author of the book “Storm Lake: Change, Resilience, and Hope from America’s Heartland.” A documentary film, “Storm Lake,” on the challenges of running a rural biweekly paper during a pandemic, was broadcast in November 2021 on the Independent Lens series on PBS. Email times@stormlake.com.
From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2022
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