Stand for Marriage Maine (S4MM) will begin to run its first TV ad today. As expected, it does not affirm traditional marriage, but uses fear in an attempt to convince voters that same-sex marriage will lead to - well, just watch for yourself:
Of course, groups like National Organization for Marriage (NOM), a front for the Mormon Church, were also sending out appeals to voters during the hearings for LD 1020, and NOM later donated $160,000 to S4MM to help gather signatures to put the so-called people's veto on the ballot.
Also, same-sex marriage in Maine will not cause churches to lose their tax exemption. What Prof. Fitzgibbons cites in the ad is a challenge to the Portland Diocese exemption based wholly on its $100,000 donation to S4MM for signature gathering.
For starters, Maine doesn't "mandate" a "comprehensive family life curriculum" for its schools.
Rather, Maine Revised Statutes Title 22 requires the commissioner of education to work with local family planning programs to develop "comprehensive family life education services" that any school district can choose (or choose not) to incorporate into its curriculum.
The statute also says that if any family-life education takes place in a school, "a parent may choose to not have (his or her) child participate" in the program.
As for "marriage" - heterosexual or homosexual - the word never appears in the statute. Not once.
Scary music. Law professor from away. There isn't much about "traditional marriage" or even Maine in this add. Compare to these two ads in support of equal marriage, the first from the NO on 1 campaign, and the second from the MCLU, EQME, and GLAD:
We accept as the rule of our life and thought the entire faith of the Catholic Church. This we see not merely in solemn definitions but in the ordinary teaching of the Pope and those bishops in union with him, and also embodied in those modes of worship and ways of Christian life, of the present as of the past, which have been in harmony with the teaching of St. Peter.s successors in the See of Rome.
The questions raised by contemporary thought must be considered with courage and dealt with in honesty. We will seek to do this, faithful to the truth always guarded in the Church by the Holy Spirit and sensitive to the needs of the family of faith. We wish to accept a responsibility which a Catholic scholar may not evade: to assist everyone, so far as we are able, to personal assent to the mystery of Christ as made manifest through the lived faith of the Church, His Body, and through the active charity without which faith is dead.
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