Man, a Romney scriptwriter couldn’t have plotted this any better:

Less than two hours after a judge struck down Iowa’s decade-old gay marriage ban, two Des Moines men applied for a marriage license as bride and groom, and county officials said they expected to see more same-sex couples doing the same on Friday.

“I started to cry because we so badly want to be able to be protected if something happens to one of us,” said David Curtis Rethmeier, 29, who was listed as the bride on that first marriage form, with Gary Allen Seronko, 51, as his groom.

Polk County Judge Robert Hanson cleared the way for the two men on Thursday when he ruled that a state law allowing marriage only between a man and woman violated the constitutional rights of due process and equal protection.

The judge ordered local officials to process marriage licenses for the six gay couples who sued. With the ruling, gay couples across the state can now apply for a marriage license in the central-Iowa county.

County attorney John Sarcone said the county would appeal to the state Supreme Court, and he immediately sought a stay from Hanson that would prevent gay couples from seeking a marriage license until the appeal is resolved.

A hearing on the stay motion is likely next week, said Camilla Taylor, an attorney with Lambda Legal, a New York-based gay rights organization.

In the meantime, Deputy County Recorder Trish Umthun is taking calls from gay couples, five of them in the first hours after the judge filed his ruling Thursday afternoon.

I’ve got nothing to say about the erstwhile “Seronkos”.  Well, that’s not true, I have all kinds of things I could say about the “blushing bride,” but it would be about as sporting as fishing with depth charges.

It would also be beside the point - the same point that Fred Thompson misses when he opposes a Federal Marriage Amendment to the Constitution yet advances the notion of preventing states from imposing their respective legal definitions of marriage on each other.  In this case, as in Massachusetts three years ago, the people did not choose to legally eviscerate the institution of marriage; local judges did. (I would say “unelected” except that many judges are elected at the state and county level - although not to legislate from the bench.)  Which means that the state of Iowa has not chosen to end its “gay marriage ban” (a biased nomanclature if ever there was one, since there’s no such thing as “gay marriage” and therefore nothing to “ban”), but has had the move effectively imposed upon it.  If the appeal is unsuccessful, that will activate the “full faith & credit” clause of the U.S. Constitution, and voila, one Polk County judge has imposed sodomarriage on the entire country.

FDT’s distinction is one without a practical difference in any case, as an Amendment modifying Article IV Section 1 for interstate marriage meddling would be resisted just as fiercely by the lavender lobby as a Marriage Amendment, and for the same reason.

As for Rudy Giuliani, this would be a golden opportunity for him to flesh out his thus far skeletal grounds for his pledge to appoint federal judges “in the mold of Roberts and Alito”.  If he stays silent, that promise will look even phonier, and it will be correspondingly less likely that the obliviousness of the GOP nominating electorate to that factor will continue.

Notice, though, the top-tier candidate who pounced on this story like a starving cannibal on Michael Moore:

The ruling in Iowa today is another example of an activist court and unelected judges trying to redefine marriage and disregard the will of the people as expressed through Iowa’s Defense of Marriage Act. This once again highlights the need for a Federal Marriage Amendment to protect the traditional definition of marriage as between one man and one woman.

And it was an Iowa judge.  Is this whole thing right down Romney’s wheelhouse or what?

(Yeah, McCain piped up too.  That’s why I used the term “top-tier” candidate.)