"We have never said that schools will be mandated -- or actually, perhaps we did..."

by: Gerald Weinand

Mon Oct 19, 2009 at 20:05:25 PM EDT

The hardest tumble a man can make is to fall over his own bluff. -- Ambrose Bierce

In a way, one has to feel for Marc Mutty. He is the chairman for Stand for Marriage Maine (S4MM), the group opposed to same-sex marriage, but only because, as he explained to the WaPo:

he agreed to lead the opposition campaign "because my boss told me to."

His boss is Bishop Richard Malone, head of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland (Maine).

S4MM hired Schubert/Flynn, the PR firm that was behind the success of Prop 8 in California in 2008, to head the campaign here, and they have used the same tactics - in some cases the exact same ads - as they did out West.

Except that this time supporters of equal marriage were prepared, and the news media has been pretty good at investigating the egregious behavior of the Yes side.

Which brings us to this report by Josie Huang on Maine Things Considered tonight, controversy rages over Question One's impact on school curricula. Deception has been the order of the day in ads from S4MM, as has been shown in these posts here: 16 Oct; 6 Oct (a); 6 Oct (b); 25 Sep; 23 Sep; 22 Sep. And that deception seems to have taken its toll on Marc Mutty, as Huang's report shows:

Marc Mutty, a spokesman for the Yes on 1/Stand for Marriage Maine campaign, says the other side is missing the point. "We understand that schools will not be mandated to provide one curriculum or another, but neither will they be discouraged or will they be unable to provide the kind of curriculum they could so choose that well could include teaching about same-sex marriage."

Mutty contends that if same-sex marriage is upheld, then it makes sense that teacher would bring up same-sex relationships in the context of a discussion on marriage - which he says is not OK with some parents. "We have never said that schools will be mandated -- or actually perhaps we did in one ad, or certainly led people to believe that inadvertently."

Never? The S4MM campaign has "inadvertently" led people to believe that "schools will be mandated" to teach about "homosexual marriage?" Whatever "teaching homosexual marriage" actually means, it is scary to the target audience of the S4MM ads.

Scary enough that the Yes campaign was willing to lie about it in order to convince them to vote against allowing same-sex marriage.

I suppose it was only a matter of time before the construct of lies collapsed - I just thought it would happen after the election, not two weeks before it.