ELDON, Iowa — As of Monday, gay couples will be allowed to marry in places like this small town that once served as the background for Grant Wood's "American Gothic," the painter's famous depiction of stern, traditional Midwesterners.
Many people, even some who live here, cannot mesh their plain-Jane image of Iowa, a state that sits so sturdily in the middle, with the front lines of the same-sex marriage debate.
"To be honest, I would rather not have it in Iowa," said Shirley Cox, who has spent most of her 84 years in this old railroad town. "But the thing is," she went on, "it's really none of my business. Who am I to tell someone how to live? I live the way I want, and they should live the way they want. I'm surely not going to stomp and raise heck and campaign against it."
This reluctance to interlope in the lives of one's neighbors — "a very Iowa attitude," in the words of one local political scientist, derived in part from the state's rural heritage — may help explain how Iowa finds itself in this moment. Add to that individualistic sensibility Iowa's political alignment and its little-known, pioneering legal past on once similarly volatile questions, like segregation and the role of women, and suddenly it seems far less surprising to outsiders that this could happen here.
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"People may think of us some other way," said Paul Lasley, a sociologist at Iowa State University, "but in the main, it is tolerance — not always support, but tolerance — that has been the weave and warp of Iowa culture.
"Understanding Iowa's culture is understanding that many of us are descendants of people once denied liberties in their home countries."