Iowa
Bill expanding Iowa’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law takes another step forward
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A bill prohibiting Iowa’s public K-12 schools from teaching students about LGBTQ-related topics at all grade levels is advancing in the House and Senate as GOP lawmakers consider expanding what critics call the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” law.
The measure would subject all of Iowa’s K-12 students to a law Gov. Kim Reynolds signed in 2023 that bans instruction on gender identity and sexual orientation through sixth grade. The wide-ranging education legislation also ordered schools to remove books that depict sex acts and remains tied up in court.
The House Education Committee voted 14-9, to advance House File 2121, which would extend the prohibition on LGBTQ-related teaching through high school. Two Republicans, Reps. Chad Ingels, R-Randalia, and Tom Moore, R-Griswold, joined Democrats in voting no.
It advanced out of subcommittee in a 2-1 vote earlier Wednesday morning.
Rep. Helena Hayes, R-New Sharon, said the measure pushes educators to stick to core curriculum such as language, English, math and history. She voted with Rep. Wendy Larson, R-Odebolt, to move it forward.
“This very narrow bill, it simply says teachers, please focus on educational topics,” Hayes said. “Please talk about academics, and that’s what we’re asking our educators to do, and that’s as simple as it is. Stay focused on the topic at hand, and that is we want to graduate intelligent, articulate, critical thinkers in this world.”
Rep. Elinor Levin, D-Iowa City, who opposed the bill, questioned why lawmakers would further legislate something that’s already tied up in court and how it helps Iowans afford their daily living costs.
“I am myself queer,” Levin said. “I have been since I was born. It is part of my existence. I experienced no great trauma or abuse growing up. In fact, I grew up in an incredibly healthy and happy family with no direct queer role models. … To pretend that queer people do not exist is neither remarkable nor wise in thinking about how we care for our kids.”
Republicans on a three-member Senate subcommittee advanced their proposal, Senate Study Bill 2003, on Jan. 21. Similar legislation has not advanced in past years, including in 2025 after a House proposal stalled once it passed out of subcommittee. There was no Senate companion bill in 2025.
The bill says that Iowa’s public school districts and charter schools cannot provide “any program, curriculum, test, survey, questionnaire, promotion or instruction relating to gender theory or sexual orientation” to K-12 students.
GOP lawmaker pushes to allow discussion of gender as a ‘theory’
Rep. Jeff Shipley, R-Birmingham, who serves on the House Education Committee, proposed amending the bill and said it may be “fairly appropriate” to discuss gender identity as a theory.
He said there are many legal questions or works of art pertaining to trans people that high school students would be mature enough to debate in a classroom setting.
“I think there’s a lot of things that could sink your teeth into if gender theory is just debated as a theory in the classroom,” Shipley said.
Hayes said the committee would consider amendments but this was already “narrowly tailored to instructional time.”
“A lot of those conversations still happen in other places and school grounds or outside of school grounds,” Hayes told reporters. “I mean, certainly people should have connections and networking beyond just their teaching and beyond just the classroom.”
Existing law still tied up in court
Iowa’s 2023 law, Senate File 496, is being challenged as unconstitutional in a federal lawsuit.
A federal judge initially granted an injunction blocking parts of the law, including the ban on teaching about gender orientation and sexual identity, while the lawsuit is decided.
But the U.S. Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed his decision, allowing the law to take effect. Attorneys argued the law’s constitutionality in federal court in January.
Iowa is one of several Republican-led states, including Florida, with similar prohibitions on classroom teaching about gender identity and sexual orientation.
Levin said it would be unwise to extend Iowa’s law while the state’s current court challenges are pending.
“I genuinely can’t think of a reason why we would move forward with this when the previous legislation is tied up in the courts,” she said.
Opponents say sexual orientation, gender identity are ‘immutable’ traits
Like in the Senate’s initial hearing, opponents of the bill outnumbered supporters as people warned lawmakers of the detrimental effects the legislation would have on LGBTQ youth.
Annie Craven, of Urbandale, said she is openly bisexual and was homeschooled and raised Catholic so she didn’t know people with her sexual orientation existed growing up. Craven is running for the Iowa House District 46 seat held by incumbent Republican Rep. Dan Gehlbach.
“That didn’t make me any less queer,” Craven said. “It did make me feel very alone and isolated and different. I resent that gender identity is being touted as political or something that we can debate or theorize. It’s immutable. It caused great harm to me as a person and as a kid growing up to not know that there were other people like me and to think that I was so different and I didn’t understand why.”
Drake University law student Karrecia Crawley said the bill imposes a “sweeping ideology that rushes to conclusions about what is taught.”
“They don’t see the foresight of what happens or what occurs when this bill is passed,” Crawley said. “I don’t believe Republicans will be in power for all that much longer if bills like this keep getting pushed and introduced into the (Legislature).”
Rev. Lizzie Gillman, an Episcopal priest in Des Moines and mother of a high school and sixth grade student, shared with lawmakers that her children’s friends feel they have no adults with whom they can discuss LGBTQ topics after recent law changes targeting LGBTQ rights.
“Jesus never said anything about gender or homosexuality,” Gillman said. “Jesus was all about love. And so what I want to know is that when we marginalize these students at a young age, they can pick it up. … I’d like you to understand whose dignity matters here.”
Supporters asks lawmakers to restore ‘focus’ on academics
Jeff Pitts, with the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition, supported the bill.
“Political indoctrination ought not to be done on the taxpayer dime at public institutions,” Pitts said.
Katherine Bogaards, with Protect My Innocence, supported the measure and said it “gives families confidence that schools will remain focused on academics and age appropriate research-based health education, not topics that confuse or overwhelm the students.”
“Supporting this bill is about preserving family values, respecting parental authority, and assuring minors are allowed to grow up without unnecessary pressure related to sexual orientation and gender identity,” Bogaards said.
Marissa Payne covers the Iowa Statehouse and politics for the Register. Reach her by email at mjpayne@registermedia.com. Follow her on X at @marissajpayne.
Kevin T. Mason, author of “Retracing the Dragoon Trail in Iowa,” came to the Ames Public Library on Wednesday. Mason went to ISU as a student and now teaches at the University of Northern Iowa. He is a rural and environmental historian of the American Midwest. Mason talked about his book covering the old Dragoon Trail, which runs across Iowa. Many have probably seen the signs all over Iowa marking the Dragoon Trail.
This all started in 1835, when the Dragoons went on an expedition across Iowa to survey the land for future Americans. Dragoons were military foot soldiers who rode horses and explored the land. When the Dragoons first encountered Iowa and explored it, the Iowa they saw was very different from the Iowa we see today.
The Dragoons are said to have hated Iowa. It was all marsh, full of mosquitoes, and it became unbearable in the winter. They were also said to have seen the largest herd of buffalo ever, with around 5,000 individuals. Iowa was also chock-full of prairies; however, today we have lost 99.8% of them.
Stephen Watts Kearny, one of the Dragoons, escorted settlers and projected military dominance; he took New Mexico and California in 1846. Albert Miller Lea dealt with the reconnaissance and mapping of the Dragoon Trail and published notes on the Wisconsin territory also. Nathan Boone led Dragoon patrols, stretched survey changes and charted the arterial paths of settlement; he is memorialized in Boone County, which is named after him, and he is honored as the son who set the stage for American settlement.
“The Dragoons are looking for a place to build a new fort,” Mason said. “They cover 1,000 miles. They’re actually going to leave, and they are going to follow the ridge between the Skunk River and the Des Moines River on their outward journey. Conveniently, we built Highway 163 right on top of it.”
The Dragoons cover in their writings, the prospect of coal, soil profiles and about the people and animals that lived here. They thought Iowa was going to become rich because of its coal, and it was going to be a great commodity.
Mason walked the entire Dragoon Trail. It was 371 miles long. It took him 21 days to walk up the river. There was some help along the way from his wife, who followed along in her car.
“In each of these chapters, I’m trying to pull a strand from at least the Dragoons all the way forward to 2021 to tell small histories of Iowa in a hyper-connected way, which took six drafts, and I still don’t know that I did it,” Mason said.
Mason also offered an interesting snippet from his book that told the tale of Boneyard Hollow:
“Just off the river’s west bay, tucked unassumingly along the winding main road of Dolliver Memorial State Park, lies a place with a name alluding to a gristly past. Boneyard Hollow, the shallow sandstone gorge slices through the park’s northern edge, shaded by oaks and maples, often quiet, save for bird song. An ancient buffalo jump, Boneyard Hollow, is only one of Iowa’s rare surviving testament to a way of life long predicting clouds and durian tiles packing miles… Shaggy mountains. Some move, and faster than man. Bison could kill with a horn or hoof. Still, human hunger demanded hunting…”
Mason says that his book is a mile wide and an inch deep. One student of Mason’s said that it was a “gateway drug into Iowa history.”
To learn more about Mason’s book, please visit his webpage.
Hear from CIWW as mandatory lawn watering ban issued in Des Moines metro
Hear from CIWW and Des Moines Water Works as Des Moines metro is placed under a lawn watering ban for the second consecutive year on June 8, 2026.
Central Iowa residents face a second consecutive summer banned from watering their lawns as Central Iowa Water Works seeks to preserve its capacity to produce sufficient safe drinking water.
CIWW announced the ban Monday, June 8, after Des Moines Water Works, its largest utility, estimated that with temperatures set to surpass 90 degrees Tuesday and high nitrate levels requiring it to provide additional treatment, demand would reach 98% of capacity.
Already, the system’s nitrate removal facility, among the world’s largest, was operating “at full throttle,” Des Moines Water Works CEO Amy Kahler said during a Monday news conference.
Here’s what to know about the ban.
Why is Central Iowa Water Works requiring a ban?
CIWW officials warned in early May that a lawn-watering ban like the one imposed in June 2025 was likely after a winter during which high nitrate levels in central Iowa’s source water — the Raccoon and Des Moines rivers — failed to abate.
Elevated nitrate concentrations in the rivers require “significantly more treatment” to achieve a federal safety standard of no more than 10 milligrams per liter, Tami Madsen, CIWW’s executive director, said at Monday’s news conference. Lawn watering greatly increases demand in warm weather, and “we have reached a point where conservation is necessary to preserve treatment capacity and ensure reliable service to everyone,” Madsen said.
Who does the ban affect?
Customers of Des Moines Water Works are the largest group. Also under the ban are Ankeny, Clive, Johnston, Norwalk, Polk City and Waukee and areas served by Urbandale Water Utility, West Des Moines Water Works, Warren Water and portions of the Xenia Water District.
Grimes, a member of the CIWW, isn’t under the ban because it’s not yet connected to the shared water distribution system.
How high have nitrate levels been?
In addition to the Raccoon and Des Moines rivers, the nitrate levels in the Des Moines Water Works’ infiltration gallery, a system of water naturally filtered through rock and sand, have been unusually high, Kahler said.
The gallery typically is the utility’s best water source. But it has been over the 10-milligrams-per-liter limit for nearly 90 days, which Kahler called a record.
On Tuesday, nitrate levels were 14.98 milligrams per liter in the Raccoon River; 11.75 milligrams in the Des Moines River; and 11.83 milligrams in the infiltration gallery, Des Moines Water Works reported.
Nitrates, even at low levels, have been tied to some cancers and to serious illness in infants. The federal government requires water utilities to alert consumers when nitrate levels rise above the standard.
What’s causing high nitrate levels in the Raccoon, Des Moines rivers?
Farming contributes about 80% of the nitrates in the Raccoon and Des Moines rivers, according to a Polk County water analysis released last year.
Iowa farmers use commercial nitrogen as well as manure from millions of pigs, chickens, turkeys and other livestock to fertilize the state’s roughly 24 million acres of corn and soybeans. Nitrogen and phosphorus, two nutrients that can befoul Iowa waterways, also naturally occur in Iowa’s rich soil.
Weather plays a major role. Drought, for example, can result in a buildup of nutrients in the soil. When rains return, as they have the past two springs, they can pick up the contaminants and move them to waterways both over land and through the drainage tiles that underlie about 13 million acres of farm fields across Iowa.
What’s being done to cut fertilizer losses?
The state adopted the Iowa Nutrient Reduction Strategy in 2013, setting a goal to cut by 45% the nitrogen and phosphorus that reach Iowa streams and ultimately flow into the Mississippi River, contributing to the dead zone around the river’s mouth in the Gulf of Mexico, renamed the Gulf of America by the U.S. government.
The state and federal governments offer farmers financial and technical assistance to adopt practices like planting cover crops and reducing or eliminating tillage to cut fertilizer losses. They also encourage establishing buffer strips, bioreactors and wetlands that help clean water as it leaves fields.
In May, Gov. Kim Reynolds announced the state will give CIWW a $25 million grant to expand and upgrade its nitrate removal facilities, part of a statewide overhaul of Iowa’s water quality funding. However, the state so far has declined to impose measures to reduce nitrates from agricultural runoff, with Reynolds saying in July 2025 that regulation “is hardly ever the answer.”
Are candidates addressing the issue?
Zach Lahn, the GOP nominee to replace retiring Republican Reynolds in this fall’s gubernatorial election, has said Iowa must “start addressing the problem at the source — not just relying on expensive treatment upgrades after the damage is already done.”
“Upgrading water treatment facilities may help in the short term, but it’s ultimately a Band-Aid approach that passes massive costs onto taxpayers and communities,” Lahn said in a post on Facebook.
Democratic nominee Rob Sand points to improved water quality as part of an effort to address Iowa’s growing cancer rate, and calls for a variety of initiatives including tax breaks for farmers who adopt conservation measures, improved water monitoring and more transparent tracking of farmers’ manure use.
“These proposals aren’t a promise to solve Iowa’s water quality issues and cancer crisis overnight,” Sand says on his campaign website. “There aren’t any realistic ways to do that overnight. But they are a promise to move our state in the right direction and the first steps towards seeing improved water quality and cancer rates in the coming years ― not the coming centuries.”
Iowa Agriculture Secretary Mike Naig, a Republican seeking reelection, has maintained that growers are making progress in preventing fertilizer losses, including leading the nation in adopting cover crops and other conservation practices and building infrastructure like wetlands.
But, he added on June 3 at the World Pork Expo in Des Moines, “There is no finish line when it comes to soil conservation and improving water quality. We can always do more.”
Chris Jones, an Iowa City Democrat and longtime activist on water quality who is challenging Naig for the agriculture secretary post, said in a statement Tuesday that the state’s approach to cutting agricultural runoff is not working.
“Des Moines area residents and people all across Iowa now commonly spend hundreds or thousands of dollars for in-home water treatment for peace of mind as they worry about their and their loved ones’ health,” Jones said, pointing to news that Iowa is one of only three states with rising new cancer rates, according to this year’s Cancer in Iowa report.
Is data center water use contributing to the water crisis?
Concern has been rising about water consumption by proliferating data centers, which use it to cool their equipment. Tech giant Microsoft, with a growing array of data centers in West Des Moines, used about 2.4% of the city’s total water last year, West Des Moines Water Works reported. It was 0.3% of the CIWW network’s overall water use in 2025.
Christina Murphy, general manager of West Des Moines Water Works, said Microsoft was nevertheless the city’s largest user in 2025, consuming 62.3 million gallons, primarily because other large business users were prevented from watering their lawns during last year’s ban. She said Microsoft does not irrigate its lawns.
Microsoft agreed in 2023 to provide West Des Moines Water Works with $25 million to provide large surface and underground water storage facilities that will offset its water usage, Murphy said.
The 300 million gallons of underground storage is still being developed, she said, adding that Microsoft also is moving to systems that reduce its water usage.
The lawn-watering ban isn’t about how much water CIWW can produce, but its capacity to treat high nitrate levels in its source water, Murphy said. “We have lots of capacity to treat water, just not with these levels of nitrates,” she said.
What about my new sod, garden and flowers?
The ban does not prevent residents from watering newly installed sod, seeded areas and trees or hand watering gardens and flowers, officials said. It also does not prevent watering of golf courses and sports fields.
CIWW encourages residents, in addition to refraining from lawn watering, to conserve home water use, including running dishwashers and washing machines only with full loads and fixing leaky faucets and toilets.
How long will the ban last?
The ban will continue until nitrate levels drop enough to guarantee there is sufficient treatment capacity to allow lawn watering to resume. For reference, last year’s ban began June 12. It began easing in stages on July 18. The last restriction ended Aug. 15.
Is central Iowa’s water safe?
“I want to be clear about one thing: Our drinking water is safe,” Madsen said at Monday’s news conference.
Donnelle Eller covers agriculture, the environment and energy for the Register. Reach her at deller@registermedia.com.
The Iowa Lottery offers several draw games for those aiming to win big with rewards ranging from $1,000 to millions. The most an Iowan has ever won from playing the lottery was $343 million in 2018 off the Powerball.
Don’t miss out on the winnings. Here’s a look at Tuesday, June 9, 2026, winning numbers for each game:
Winning Mega Millions numbers from June 9 drawing
09-30-36-38-40, Mega Ball: 03
Check Mega Millions payouts and previous drawings here.
Winning Pick-3 numbers from June 9 drawing
Midday: 5-8-4
Evening: 4-5-6
Check Pick-3 payouts and previous drawings here.
Winning Pick-4 numbers from June 9 drawing
Midday: 8-7-2-5
Evening: 2-3-8-0
Check Pick-4 payouts and previous drawings here.
Winning Millionaire for Life numbers from June 9 drawing
23-25-33-35-50, Bonus: 05
Check Millionaire for Life payouts and previous drawings here.
Feeling lucky? Explore the latest lottery news & results
When are the Iowa Lottery drawings held?
- Powerball: 9:59 p.m. CT on Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday.
- Mega Millions: 10:00 p.m. CT on Tuesday and Friday.
- Lotto America: 9:15 p.m. CT on Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday.
- Lucky for Life: 9:38 p.m. CT daily.
- Pick 3 (Day): 12:20 p.m. CT daily.
- Pick 3 (Evening): 10:00 p.m. CT daily.
- Pick 4 (Day): 12:20 p.m. CT daily.
- Pick 4 (Evening): 10:00 p.m. CT daily.
- Millionaire for Life: 10:15 p.m. CT daily.
This results page was generated automatically using information from TinBu and a template written and reviewed by an Iowa editor. You can send feedback using this form.
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