Court Opinion

ID: 9685440
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 14:37:39.684649+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:18:06.021735
License: Public Domain

HARRIS, Justice
(concurring).
I agree with the majority opinion but feel obligated to write separately to respond to the dissent. The dissent’s characterization *456of the basis for the majority holding strikes me as inaccurate and unfortunate.
In years past the petitioners’ organizations adhered to a membership policy which has since been discredited. The policy is not at issue here; our question is whether the civil rights commission had authority to assess $39,000 in damages against the Jaycees as a result of the position previously followed.
Unless the assessment of damages can be justified alone on our disapproval of the discredited policy, it must be based on some recognized legal principle. The vehicle chosen by the litigants is an Iowa statute. The controlling question is one of legislative intent. When it adopted the Iowa civil rights Act in 1965, did the legislature intend for the term “public accommodation” to include member organizations, such as the Jaycees? The statutory definition, quoted in the majority opinion, is simply not susceptible of that interpretation.
In recognizing this, the majority does not depart in any way from this court’s long tradition of protecting human liberties. Our present views on the social appropriateness of that legislative decision do not bear on the question of what the legislature intended when it enacted the statute. Neither should our understanding of that intent be controlled by subsequent pronouncements on what the law has since become, which is something very different from what the legislature envisioned. Although the dissenters may be justified in applauding the development, they are not justified in using their approval of the change to retroactively describe a legislative intent.
Neither is Roberts v. United States Jaycees, 468 U.S. 609, 104 S.Ct. 3244, 82 L.Ed.2d 462 (1984), authority for interpreting Iowa’s civil rights Act in contravention of its expressed wording. Roberts stands only for the proposition that the federal courts are not to interfere, on grounds of right of association under the first amendment, with a state court interpretation of its own statute. Although the first amendment does not prohibit the commission’s interpretation of the statute, the plain words chosen by the legislature clearly do. This is the only “message” in the majority opinion.
CARTER, J., joins this concurrence.