It's day four for legal same-sex marriage in Iowa, and I still haven't seen any reports of couples being refused a marriage license anywhere in the state. The Des Moines Register reported that about 350 same-sex couples received marriage licenses on Monday, the day the Iowa Supreme Court's ruling in Varnum v Brien went into effect. More than half of those applications were in five large counties: Polk (Des Moines area), Johnson (Iowa City), Linn (Cedar Rapids), Pottawattamie (Council Bluffs) and Scott (Quad Cities area).

According to this map on the Des Moines Register's site, about half of Iowa's 99 counties have issued at least one marriage license to a same-sex couple. No counties have denied marriage licenses yet, but many have yet to receive an application from a same-sex couple.

One Iowa, the largest LGBT advocacy group in the state, is trying to raise $25,000 by the end of April (that's today) in order to collect on a matching gift that will keep their television ad on the air. Click here to watch the ad and donate.

The Des Moines Register's business section featured an article on Thursday about gay-friendly wedding planners. Resources mentioned in the piece include gayweddingswithpanache.com, myiowagaywedding.com, iowasgayweddingplanner.com and iowagayweddingdirectory.com. Beau Fodor of gayweddingswithpanache.com said the most frequent questions he's been asked by out-of-state wedding seekers are whether people can get married on one of the covered bridges of Madison County and whether they will need to hire security for their wedding because of protests from those who oppose gay marriage. There were public protests in various Iowa cities on Monday, but none escalated to violence, and I haven't heard of any protesters standing outside county recorders' offices since then.

I believe that marriage equality has given the social conservatives the upper hand in the struggle for control over the Republican Party of Iowa. However, Republican moderates are not going to give up without a fight. Doug Gross, a Republican power-broker who was the 2002 gubernatorial nominee, is holding a press conference tomorrow to discuss results from a poll he commissioned last month. (A group of Republican insiders got an exclusive briefing on the poll today in Des Moines.) Although Gross is conservative personally, he has been calling on fellow Republicans to drop their litmus-test approach to social issues and focus more on Reaganesque rhetoric about the economy. Gross warned earlier this week that while gay marriage could be a good issue for Iowa Republicans, "if Republicans let this be the only thing they talk about, they won't be successful in 2010."

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that nationally, more Republicans are "rethinking" the party's stance on gay marriage:

The fact that a run of states have legalized gay marriage in recent months -- either by court decision or by legislative action -- with little backlash is only one indication of how public attitudes about this subject appear to be changing.

More significant is evidence in polls of a widening divide on the issue by age, suggesting to many Republicans that the potency of the gay-marriage question is on the decline. It simply does not appear to have the resonance with younger voters that it does with older ones.

Consider this: In the latest New York Times/CBS News poll, released on Monday, 31 percent of respondents over the age of 40 said they supported gay marriage. By contrast, 57 percent under age 40 said they supported it, a 26-point difference. Among the older respondents, 35 percent said they opposed any legal recognition of same-sex couples, be it marriage or civil unions. Among the younger crowd, just 19 percent held that view.

I expect this trend to accelerate if marriage equality does not lead to an electoral backlash against Iowa Democrats next year.