Box Turtle Bulletin

Maine’s Anti-Gay Marriage Campaign Leader is Completely Insane

Mark Mutty, Executive Chairman of the Stand for Marriage coalition, made a most interesting to a reporter from the Maine Public Broadcasting Network:

As a longtime public affairs director for the diocese, Mutty views himself and the coaliton as defending the traditional definition of marriage and the role it plays in society. To redefine it by allowing same-sex couples to marry, Mutty says will lead to curriculum changes in the schools.

“And many certainly feel uncomfortable about that, and the fact that children as young as seven or eight years old are going to be taught about gay sex in some detail.”

Wait… what?!?

If Maine gets marriage equality then seven year old kids will be taught about gay sex in detail?

OK.

That’s completely and entirely irrational. Second graders aren’t taught about straight sex and heterosexuals have been getting married in Maine all year long. No one is going to be telling small children the mechanics of sex between anyone in school.

So either Mutty is a completely delusional nutcase with no cognizance of the world around him and should be put somewhere for his own safety or he’s a bald-faced liar who is seeking to demonize gay people and scare voters with claims that he himself knows to be completely bogus.

Liar or lunatic. There really aren’t any other options.

Maine’s Marriage Equality to go to Vote

It’s official.

The Secretary of State’s Office has confirmed that groups opposed to same-sex marriage have gathered enough petition signatures to place a repeal effort on the November ballot. David Farmer, spokesman for Gov. John Baldacci, said that the governor signed a proclamation on Wednesday setting up the Nov. 3 vote.

Protect Maine Equality issued the following statement:

“There’s no surprise here. Everyone knew marriage equality would be challenged by a referendum and that’s why our allies began having conversations with Mainers three years ago. We now have nearly 80,000 Mainers who have pledged their support for equality.

“This was a quarter-of-a-million dollar signature effort by a Michigan firm, and it highlights the stark differences in our campaigns. Their’s is a cynical, pay-for-every signature approach that doesn’t reflect the homegrown values of our state.

“By contrast, we have put our trust in the common sense and fair mindedness of our friends, neighbors and co-workers. And that’s why we believe voters will reject Question 1 because here in Maine, we believe everyone should be allowed to live their lives and be treated equally under the law.”

Maine’s Battle For Marriage Is On

The Associated Press reports:

Opponents of Maine’s new gay marriage law have submitted petitions seeking a November referendum on the measure. Leaders of the Stand for Marriage campaign said Friday they collected more than 100,000 signatures of registered Maine voters. Cartons containing the petitions have been turned into the secretary of state’s office to be certified.

To qualify for a November referendum, 55,087 signatures need to be certified by Sept. 4. Meanwhile, a July 17 email from Betsy Smith, senior director of Equality Maine, indicates that $241,000 have already poured into the coffers of marriage opponents, including $160,000 from the National Organization for Marriage, $50,000 from the Knights of Columbus, and $31,000 from Focus On the Family. Now it’s time for us to do our part.

Maine Marriage Update

According the the Family Research Council’s website, anti-marriage activists in Maine appear to have collected enough signatures to allow for an adequate buffer.

Mainers are sending a strong message to their elected officials, who voted in May to redefine marriage. Needing roughly 56,000 petition signatures to place a “People’s Veto” of this legislation on the November ballot, the pro-marriage coalition has exceeded all expectations by collecting over 90,000 and counting.

This does not appear, however, to be the total that has been collected and processed but rather those reported to the the anti-gay effort. We should know at the end of the month the actual number that is turned in.

Anti-Gay Maine Campaign’s Lack of Grassroots Funding

From Bangor Daily News

[Mark Mutty, one of Stand for Marriage Maine\’s campaign leaders,] predicted Wednesday that they will file “a very significant amount of signatures well in excess of the minimum” by early August. In addition to [$100,000 from] the Roman Catholic Diocese and [$160,000 from] the National Organization for Marriage, the organization also received $50,000 from the Knights of Columbus in Washington, D.C., and $31,000 from the Focus on the Family Maine Marriage Committee but only $400 from individuals.

Mutty pointed out that his organization\’s Web site has only been up for less than two weeks and he predicted that the number of individual donations will increase dramatically as the campaign ramps up.

Well duh. Almost anything would be a dramatic increase over $400.

In contrast

Connolly said Maine Freedom to Marry has already received support from a national organization, in this case, $25,000 from the Human Rights Campaign in Washington, D.C. But he pointed out that his organization has already received donations from 352 individuals.

I’m sure this means nothing. But it’s interesting to note that at present the battle is between the big religious institutions and the citizens.

Anti-Gays in Maine Claim 70,000 Signatures

According to Everyday Christian,

Earlier this week, about 70,000 signatures had been gathered, with more expected, according to Bob Emrich.

Earlier this week, other press was reporting 55,000. I guess we’ll wait and see.

Maine’s Anti-Gay Signature Collecting Update

Stand For Marriage Maine, the coalition of anti-gay activists who are seeking to overturn Maine’s marriage laws, has announced that they have enough signatures to put their petition on the ballot.

Looking to overturn a bill signed by Governor John Baldacci in May approving same sex marriage, Stand For Marriage Maine announced today that they have collected more than the 55,087 signatures needed to place a People’s Veto on the November ballot and are collecting additional signatures as insurance to meet the deadline to qualify the measure for the 2009 statewide election.

While that makes for a good press release, it doesn’t tell the full story.

As any politico will tell you, a large percentage of the signatures in any collection effort will prove to be invalid for a number of reasons. Some folks are not actually registered to vote, are registered at a different address, are registered under a different name, or provide an illegible signature. Some will agree to sign but will put down a fake name. So petitioners always collect enough extra names to have a substantial cushion.

In mid June, Bob Emrich, the head of the effort, set a goal of collecting 80,000 signatures by the middle of July. At that time they had about 12,000 already collected.

It now appears that they are not on schedule to meet their goal. By now they should have collected a total of 63,000 signatures. And to reach 80,000 by next week, they will have to collect 25,000 signatures, or nearly half of what they collected in the past month. And at this point each additional signature will be harder to get than the one before.

However, it is still very likely that the campaign can meet its goals. The projected cushion of 25,000 is aggressive; and a campaign can usually assume that a 20-25% cushion is adequate and that may well be within their means. And as the campaign doesn’t actually have to turn in the signatures until the end of the month, they can use the extra weeks for signature collection rather than for verification.

But it is encouraging to see that their efforts are not proving to be a smooth or easy as they anticipated. As I said in June, we need to hope for their failure and plan for their success.

An Unequal Flag For Unequal Citizens

This six star “Flag of Equal Marriage” represents the six states which have marriage equality, by order of their entry into the Union. The stars are arranged according to the order in which each state was admitted to the union, skipping over the states that do not have marriage equality. The six stars represent:

• Connecticut – #5.
• Massachusetts – #6.
• New Hampshire – #9 (Effective Jan 1, 2010)
• Vermont – #14 (Effective Sep 1, 2009)
• Maine – #23 (Effective of Sep 14, 2009)
• Iowa – #29

If this flag had been around in 2008, we would have seen California’ star (#31) go dark. There’s a move on right now to darken Maine’s star in November.

[Hat tip: David Schmader]

Fraudulent Maine Marriage Petitioners

Reports are coming in that some people collecting signatures in opposition to the new marriage law in Maine are doing so under false pretenses (Sun Journal):

Gerard Caron walked into the Auburn Post Office and was met by a woman with a pair of clipboards.

“This petition is against gay marriage and this other petition is to support gay marriage,” she said, according to Caron.

The Poland man said he asked her why there would be a petition to support something that already happened, referring to the petition “in support of” gay marriage.

“She just kinda gave me a little grin and didn’t say anything,” he said.

Then he looked at the two petitions and discovered they were identical, both were supporting the repeal of the same-sex marriage law, Caron said.

Although the Secretary of State thinks that collecting signatures under false pretenses is a “First Amendment issue”, I suspect that if it was shown that this is a widespread deception that a lawsuit claiming fraud could prevail. The language is adequately tricky that persons could reasonably be deceived into thinking they were signing a pro-marriage petition even after reading it.

I just think it is just another example in a long line of instances that illustrates the base immorality of those who will crawl through the gutter to demonstate just how Special They Are To God by denying civil equalities to others.

Anti-Gays Seek to Overturn Maine’s Marriage Law

Maine has a peculiar system by which citizens unhappy with a legislative action can stop and reverse a bill. Called a “people’s veto”, if petitioners collect the signatures of ten percent of voters within 90 days of the end of the legislative session, a question goes on the ballot as to whether the bill should be enacted.

After the legislature enacted marriage equality in Maine, anti-gay activists began to organize to oppose the bill and to seek to get it on the ballot.

“Do you want to reject the new law that lets same-sex couples marry and allows individuals and religious groups to refuse to perform these marriages?”

The above somewhat-confusing language was prepared on May 19. And the process began. The Everyday Christian website has a progress report on their efforts:

Emrich, a pastor, is the founder of The Jeremiah Project, a conservative non-profit. To date, he said between 10,000 and 12,000 signatures have been collected since late May. The goal, he said, is to get about 80,000 signatures before the petitions are handed in to account for potential duplications and errors.

However, to achieve their ends, the petitioners need to meet a date sooner than 90 days. Unless they file their signatures by August 1, they will miss the deadline for the November election and the article lays out several reasons why anti-gays think November is better for them than the following spring election.

So how likely is it that they will reach their goal?

With 500 and 600 people Emrich is aware of distributing, it now becomes a race against the clock. He said he would like to get petitions back by mid-July to get them certified by individual town clerks before sending them on to the Secretary of State.

In the four weeks since the beginning of the collection process, they have collected about 12,000 signatures. To meet their target date, they will need to collect an additional 68,000 signatures in the following four weeks; or, on average, each one of their 600 volunteers needs to get 114 additional signatures over the next four weeks.

This may not sound particularly large, but a few factors need to be taken into consideration:

• The first 12,000 were probably the easiest. Each additional signature will prove to be more difficult.
• Only about a third of Maine’s residents attend religious services. Of these, about 60% are Catholic. And while Catholic hierarchy stongly opposes marriage equality, lay Catholics are much less inclined to follow the directions of the church on social issues. Assuming that all Evangelical Protestants and half of Catholics are the target audience for signature gatherers – and discounting for 21% of the population below voting age – there is only a pool of about 257,000 adult church members from which to draw signatures.
• Signature gatherers in public places (other than churches) are likely to encounter active opposition.
• Michael Heath, executive director of the Maine Family Policy Council, is known in Maine as being radically exteme, far from the thinking of the average conservative Christian; he’s on par with his friend Peter LaBarbera. While Heath’s taking a public back seat on this issue, his is still probably the name most associated with this effort.
• Michael Heath’s last anti-gay signature collecting effort failed miserably.
• The Republican Party in Maine is not comprised of fire breathers. Both US Senators are Republicans, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, and both are supporting of the gay community. Neither made any criticism of the legislature in their state for enacting marriage and Collins was mentioned today by the President as a sponsor of the Domestic Partners Benefits and Obligations Act. The Party is not likely to expend much organizational effort on behalf of the petition.

I think that it will be quite difficult for the anti-gay activists to achieve their goal. But I don’t think it is impossible or even improbable. We need to hope for their failure but plan for their success.

Over the next month, we’ll keep you up to date on whatever we find about the progress of their efforts.

(hat tip to reader Brian)

New Hampshire Would be the Sixth What, Exactly?

New Hampshire could be the sixth gay marriage something-or-other, but finding the language to fit is not a straight-forward task. Considering the methods by which states have reached (and retreated from) marriage rights, putting them in order depends on what one is measuring.

The order in which states have granted recognition to same sex couples

1. District of Columbia 1992 (blocked by Congress until 2002)
2. Hawaii 1997
3. California 1999
4. Vermont 1999
5. Connecticut 2005
6. New Jersey 2004
7. Maine 2004
8. New Hampshire 2007
9. Washington 2007
10. Oregon 2007
11. Maryland 2008
12. Iowa 2009
13. Colorado 2009

The order in which courts have found that states must provide marriage and/or all its rights and benefits to same-sex couples:

1. Hawaii 1993/1997 (reversed by Constitutional amendment)
2. Vermont 1999
3. Massachusetts 2003
4. New Jersey 2006
5. California 2008 (perhaps reversed by Constitutional amendment)
6. Connecticut 2008
7. Iowa 2009

The order in which states provided virtually all of the same benefits as marriage

1. Vermont 1999
2. California 2003 (with subsequent minor adjustments to fix differences)
3. Massachusetts 2003
4. Connecticut 2005
5. District of Columbia 2006 (with adjustment in 2008)
6. New Jersey 2006
7. New Hampshire 2007
8. Oregon 2007
9. Washington 2009
10. Maine 2009

The order in which legal marriages were first performed

1. Massachusetts – 5/17/2004
2. Iowa – 8/31/2007 (only one)
3. California – 6/16/2008
4. Connecticut – 11/4/2008
5. Vermont – 9/1/2009 (Scheduled)
6. Maine – around 9/14/2009 (Scheduled)

The order in which continuous legal marriages began to be offered

1. Massachusetts – 5/17/2004
2. Connecticut – 11/4/2008
3. Iowa – 4/27/09
4. Vermont – 9/1/2009 (Scheduled)
5. Maine – around 9/14/2009 (Scheduled)

And should New Hampshire\’s bill be signed, it will be sixth.

RNC Responds to Maine Marriage Bill

At first it looked as though the Republican Party was going to walk away from the Maine marriage decision whistling and looking away as if they didn’t notice. But finally Chairman Michael Steele released the following statement:

Our party platform articulates our opposition to gay marriage and civil unions, positions shared by many Americans. I believe that marriage should be between one man and one woman and strongly disagree with Maine\’s decision to legalize gay marriage.

Steele spoke of what “the platform” articulates about “our opposition” rather than trying to suggest that opposition to both marriage and civil unions is the position of a majority of Republicans. Further he said that “many” rather than “most” Americans share the platform’s positions. As for his opinion, he limited it to marriage and didn’t discuss his personal beliefs on civil unions.

There is no suggestion that this is thwarting the will of the people or accusations of undue activism or calls for initiatives. There is no appeal to tradition, God, founding fathers, the fabric of society, or 5000 years of definition.

This two sentence statement appears not to have been broadly released nor was there a press conference. This suggests to me that the Republican leadership wants a low profile about same-sex marriages – especially those passed by a legislature – at this time. I would find it hard to craft a more tepid response.

Whether this is because of a change in perspective, polling data, some new found respect for states rights, or just plain political calculus, I welcome it. And I’m awfully glad that Michael Steele is the current head of the RNC rather than, say, Ken Blackwell.

Maine’s Senators, both of whom are Republican women who have been supportive of gay rights, both stated that they support the rights of the state to determine its own marriage laws. While neither fully came out and endorsed the bill, neither had anything negative to say about it either. This was also the reaction of the White House.

In fact, other than the usual ranting voices endorsing religious oppression, the objection to the actions taken in Maine, New Hampshire, and the District of Columbia have been muted to the extent they have been raised at all.

MAINE GETS MARRIAGE

Governor Balducci signed the marriage bill.

From the San Jose Mercury News (who, for some reason reported the story first)

Gov. John Baldacci has signed a bill making Maine the fifth state to allow gay marriage.

Earlier in the day, the Maine Legislature gave final approval to gay marriage and sent the bill to Baldacci, who had been undecided on the issue.

What Happens Next

If this were a bill without opposition, it would come into effect 90 days after the end of the legislative session. However Michael Heath, executive director of the Maine Family Policy Council, has already announced that he will seek a “people’s veto” of the legislation.

A people’s veto works like this: After the end of the legislative session (probably some time in June), Heath can begin collecting signatures. He needs 10% of the last gubernatorial vote, or 55,087 valid signatures. If Heath gets enough signatures, the bill will not go into effect until it has been presented on the November ballot for an up or down vote. Yes means keep the bill, No means veto it.

Although Heath will have 90 days to collect signatures, he must present the signatures no later than 60 days before the vote, around September 3rd. Thus, may be a strange window in which signatures can be collected but in which they will not count towards forcing a vote.

Which raises a question. Were Heath to present signatures on, say, September 5 and were that day within 90 days of the end of the legislative session, would that place a stay on the enactment of the bill until the following election in the spring of 2010? While that might be a “dirty trick” that could momentarily work in Heath’s favor, it may in the long run prove to be detrimental. As time goes by, it is increasingly likely that attitudes in Maine will favor equality. This will be especially true as no dire consequences result in Vermont, Connecticut, or Massachusetts. Heath’s window of possible success may close.

As it is, Heath may have a rough go. Attitudes seem fairly even in Maine but Heath has a rather bad reputation in the state dating from his attempts to identify and out gay legislators. His requests for “tips, rumors, speculation and facts” resulted in a temporary ouster from the Christian Civic League (a previous name of the Maine Family Policy Council) and a significant amount of bad press.

Heath may well be an advantage for us. He tends towards extremism and outrageous hyperbole. Additionally, it looks as though Peter LaBarbera may be a part of the effort.

The Current Status of Marriage Equality – 5/5/09

Green = marriage; Yellow = needs Governor signature

With marriage equality issues changing so very quickly, here’s where the current status stands (my apologies for any inaccuracies):

California – the State Supreme Court has until June 6 to announce whether Proposition 8 is constitutional and, if so, what impact it has on the 18,000 same-sex couples who married between June and November 2008. There are mixed opinions on what the court will decide.

Colorado – The legislature passed a Designated Beneficiary Agreement Act, which has been signed by the Governor.

Illinois – a bill has been introduced to enact Civil Unions. The bill is currently waiting for a House vote.

Maine – The House and the Senate have both passed a marriage bill. Tomorrow it goes before the Senate for final approval and then to Gov. John Baldacci, who is “keeping an open mind”. Anti-Gays will immediately seek a “People’s Veto”, a process by which an enacted bill can be placed before the voters for an up or down vote. They would need about 55,000 valid signatures by the first of September. It would be led by Michael Heath who has established his reputation in Maine as an extremist and a homophobe.

Nevada – The Senate passed a bill to provide Domestic Partnerships with all the rights and obligations of marriage. It will go before the Assembly Judiciary on Friday. The Governor has promised to veto the bill but some sources say that there will be a compromise crafted before the legislature disbands in a month.

New Hampshire – The House and Senate have both passed a marriage bill. The Senate version had specific religious protections that were not in the House bill. The House Judiciary has approved the changes and they will go before a House vote tomorrow. The Governor has stated that he is opposed to gay marriage in the past but has not addresses this specific bill.

New York – A marriage bill has been introduced in the house. Log Cabin Republicans announced that they have found additional Republican support in the House for marriage. Senate Majority Leader Smith will not bring marriage to a vote in the Senate until adequate votes will assure its passage, which probably means that four to six Republicans will need to be convinced. Empire State Pride is doing polling in Republican districts and seeking to give them assurance that a vote for equality will not result in an election defeat.

Washington – a bill to upgrade the state\’s Domestic Partnerships to provide all the rights and obligations of marriage has passed the Senate and House with large margins and will be signed by the Governor. A petition has been filed to put it to the voters.

District of Columbia – the Council voted to recognize out of state marriages. This bill will be signed by the Mayor and then Congress has 30 days to review and possibly overturn it by a majority vote in both houses and the signature of the President. A same-sex marriage bill is expected later this year.

Also see our last synopsis on April 9

Maine House Approves Marriage Equality

The Maine House of Representatives has approved a bill providing for same-sex marriage by a vote of 89–58. This follows last week’s approval in the state Senate. The bill now goes to Governor John Baldacci (D), who hasn’t said publicly whether he will sign it or not. He has indicated privately however that he may be open to signing it.