| This remarkable email landed in my mailbox this afternoon, from Marc Mutty, spokesman for Stand for Marriage Maine (S4MM).
Its remarkable for the number of lies and half-truths used to promote the fear that the Yes on 1 side hopes will overturn Maine's law that allows same-sex couples to marry.
It begins:
Today marks just four weeks until Election Day and the future of marriage in Maine - and perhaps in the nation - is determined.
It's clear that the central issue around Question 1 is the impact of homosexual marriage on our children and how they will be exposed to such instruction in our schools. Our opponents know they can't win if Mainers know the truth, so they deny, deflect, and distract from this central question.
We won't let them get away with it.
Of course, An Act To End Discrimination in Civil Marriage and Affirm Religious Freedom (LD 1020), has nothing to do with what is taught in Maine Schools. As David Connerty-Marin, Communications Director for the Department of Education made clear after the Wirthlin ad was released:
The ad is entirely misleading...Here in Maine, our Learning Results standards and education regulations make no reference to the teaching of marriage in any way. So a change in Maine's laws or definition of marriage places no requirements on local districts regarding whether or how they teach about marriage. Such curriculum decisions are strictly local. Before or after passage of the gay marriage law a district could choose to teach about marriage or not, and to teach about it in any way it deemed appropriate. It simply is not governed by state education law.
Mutty continues:
Today, we give Mainers another reason to support Question 1: a powerful new television commercial providing evidence that homosexual relationships are being taught in public schools under the umbrella of the so-called "Safe Schools" curriculum. If Question 1 fails and gay marriage were to be legalized, this is one area of the curriculum where it would be pushed on our children, just as it has been in other states.
There are few things here: despite what Mutty claims, there is no "curriculum" waiting in the wings to be deployed on schools throughout Maine. First, as Connerty-Marin makes plain, local school boards decide whether marriage is to be taught at all, and how. Second, there is no "curriculun" waiting to be deployed at each school, and even if there was, it would still have to receive approval of the aforementioned school boards.
And third, and this is most troubling, it seems as if Mutty is suggesting that it is better to have schools that are not safe places for all children to attend (be they the children of gay parents, or are gay themselves), than to have programs that teach acceptance, tolerance, and respect.
And Mutty is a priest. (My bad) There's more:
Our commercial cites the "Safe Schools Curriculum Addressing Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity" used in the Alameda Unified School District in Alameda, California. The "Safe Schools" curriculum in California, like in Maine and elsewhere, is one where young children are introduced to homosexual relationships at an early age.
S4MM must not think very highly of the intellectual capacity of those that it is trying to persuade, because everyone knows that Alameda is not a town in Maine, and what the good citizens of that East Bay city choose to use in their schools has no relation at all to ours.
And this really gets to the crux of what the ad campaign from S4MM will be about from now until Election Day, four weeks off. Mutty, and Frank Schubert, the man running S4MM's ad campaign, are going to rely on what they think is the ignorance of Maine voters. They think that Mainers are so stupid that they can easily be manipulated by baldfaced lies used to engender irrational fear.
This will be their campaign in a word: FEAR.
And the only way to combat that fear is to tell everyone that you encounter that there is nothing to fear.
Because there isn't. |
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