Jason Benell lives in Des Moines with his wife and two children. He is a combat veteran, former city council candidate, and president of Iowa Atheists and Freethinkers and the author of the Substack newsletter The Odd Man Out.

Iowa used to be a state of Firsts. It was introduced as a free state to counter Texas as a slave state into the United States. Iowa was famous for its participation in the Civil War on the side of the Union. Iowa has such a steeped and storied history in education that leaders chose a schoolhouse for the state’s commemorative quarter, to demonstrate how much Iowans value education. The Iowa Supreme Court ruled that school segregation was unconstitutional 86 years before the U.S. Supreme Court mandated desegregation nationally. 

The rights of women via the suffragists were a massive force in Iowa. The University of Iowa was a destination for many award-winning writers like Kurt Vonnegut, and Iowa State University broke racial barriers with Jack Trice and George Washington Carver. Iowa was among the first states to legalize same sex marriage in 2009 before it was done nationally. Governor Robert Ray, a Republican, became famous for welcoming immigrants, setting up a refugee center for thousands of Tai Dam refugees during the 1970s.

That positive impact is still felt today.

These things are a legacy to be proud of. Folks could say, “You know, Iowa did contribute quite a bit to the American story,” something more than pork, corn, soybean exports, and flyover country.

However, we have to take a serious and honest look at the history here. For far too long, Iowa has had a reputation as a Midwestern state that isn’t backward and small-minded, “like the other ones.” After all, we had all of these accolades, right?

What happened?

The obvious and easy answer is reactionary Republicanism happened, but it isn’t that simple. Every single time Iowa has turned the wheel of progress a step forward, a strong and loud and federally subsidized rural—and specifically white—withered claw yanks it back. White Iowans have always had that claw ready to grab that lever of power every single time Iowa has strayed to the left of what is commonly called “the center.”

The voting patterns of the rural white Iowan electorate maps nearly perfectly onto policies of grievance, fear of communities of color, Christian Nationalism, and corporate greed. An electorate that thinks they always know best for others, and other people’s disenfranchisement and deaths are a price they are willing to pay for their own prosperity. From that perspective, the civil rights highlights listed above are the exception, not the rule when it comes to Iowa law.

Let’s take a closer look at a lot of those decades-old triumphs, and what is often left off of the proud Iowa banners. We should look at how the people of Iowa responded. We have to remember: after the Iowa Supreme Court’s historic marriage equality ruling in 2009, social conservatives led by evangelical Christians targeted and successfully ousted three justices in the very next election.

When Governor Ray invited the Tai Dam people to settle in Iowa that as they fled violence abroad, some Iowans opposed the policy. They were concerned about “those people” and losing jobs to immigrants. This despite the fact that the state’s top Republican official was looking for ways to resettle a displaced people. Not a lot of “shirts off their back” for those folks from rural Iowans, were there?

This is the state where a drugstore owner refused to serve Black patrons based on their race, a practice that stopped only following an Iowa Supreme Court ruling in 1949. Even though a civil rights law was on the books, the drugstore owner felt comfortable with a discriminatory policy, because Iowa courts had secured just three convictions under that law in 40 years. They were intentionally not enforcing the law.  It shouldn’t surprise us, then, that one of the longest serving U.S. senators, Iowa’s own Chuck Grassley, was endorsed loudly and proudly by the Ku Klux Klan in 1980.

Under Republican control, the state with a much-vaunted education system immediately set about under-funding education, forcing more consolidation of rural schools, attacking teachers unions, and divesting from education programs in universities.

Iowa once had a strong record of protecting the rights of women and disadvantaged groups, at least in text if not always in deed. Now the Iowa Supreme Court majority considers women and those with uteruses to have less rights to control their own body than a homeowner has not to have law enforcement search trash left at the side of the road.

We need look no further than the capital city, Des Moines, which built a freeway across the city, connecting the North East to the South West—with the bulk of the work being built directly over and through long-established Black neighborhoods.

Iowa has had a lot of things going for it in the past, but too often has followed a pattern of a painstaking half-step forward for everyone, followed by predominantly white voters shoving the state three steps back.

We all have stories of family members or neighbors who would give you shirts off their back or help you jump-start a truck in winter. But are they really helping you if—after they’re done jumping the truck—they stop your children from getting food assistance between semesters? If they clear out your driveway but consider your addressing your son by their name or pronoun an act of sexual abuse? If after they are done making sure your animals are fed out back, they head down to the local precinct to ensure you will never know the chemicals being fed into your drinking water?

Which brings us to the present day.

Our state’s attorney general chooses to attack Costco—a business with four locations in Iowa—for having committed “wrongthink,” instead of attacking corruption and self dealing by major domestic industries. Iowa is fighting to have a 50-year-old law protecting people with disabilities declared unconstitutional, even as discriminatory sectarian schools siphon public dollars for their own anti-science curriculums. Cancer is literally killing the most vulnerable people in rural counties, but instead the Iowa way is to attack other elected offices because they seek to inform the public on government expenditures.

This is the true story of Iowa, I think. A state that would rather believe stories about ourselves than live up to them.

It has always been this way. While Iowa has had great ideals and victories, citizens often shrink from the challenge when asked to live up to those ideals. When asked to consider the rights and liberties of all Iowans, they retreat to folksy wisdom or seek out some new and esoteric grievance to justify pushing down their neighbors.

Rather than find new solutions and build a better future, they return to the federal agricultural promise of subsidy and paper over what that really means for the state and its long-term health. They want “Iowa Nice” to be holding the door open to the bar, but not the racist comments muttered to the bartender when a disfavored athlete or politician shows up on the TV.  Its far easier for them to cite the decency of literally 20 years ago than it is to face the cruelty that we see willfully done today.

This is Iowa, and it looks like what it has always been.