GOP Rep: Gay Marriage Will Lead to Warehousing Kids

Far-right Iowa Republican congressman Steve King (pictured) says extending marriage rights to same-sex couples will eventually lead to the institution's demise and the placement of children in "warehouses."

"Marriage is the crucible by which we pour all of our values and pass them on to our children, and that is how the culture is renewed each time," King told The Iowa Independent after an anti-marriage equality rally in Cedar Rapids Wednesday. "So, if we lose marriage -- for instance, if our children are raised in warehouses, so to speak ... we can't teach our values. We won't be able to teach our faith. We won't be able to teach life."

The rally where King appeared was part of a tour across Iowa organized by three antigay groups: the National Organization for Marriage, the Family Research Council, and the American Family Association. The groups are trying to persuade voters to remove three Iowa supreme court justices from office because they ruled in favor of marriage equality last year. The ruling was unanimous, but only three of the seven justices are up for retention votes in the November 2 election.

Another attendee at the antigay gathering, Randy Crawford, told the Independent that gay people are "running rampant" in the liberal university town of Iowa City, where he lives. Because they have gained political power there, "they are doing vicious stuff ... like the Iago figure," the villain in Shakespeare's play Othello, he said. He also put forth a theory that homosexuality is "obsolete" but may have been useful in prehistoric times: "If I'm a guy out hunting, I want to leave someone back at the cave tending to my wife and kids, and I don't want a normal guy having that kind of access to my wife and kids."

Participants at the antigay event, while vocal, were small in number -- about 20, the Independent reported. An equal number of counterprotesters stood nearby, and another 150 had rallied in support of the justices earlier in the day at the Linn County Courthouse in Cedar Rapids. Supporters included attorney Ruth Harkin, who is a member of the Iowa Board of Regents and the wife of Democratic U.S. senator Tom Harkin, and Don Rowen, a former leader of the Iowa Federation of Labor. Said Harkin: "As Iowans we share a common duty to stand up for fairness, to fend off these fanatical views, and to make sure that our judicial system continues to work for all of us."