This should have been a victory letter. But I won’t drone on about my disappointment over last Tuesday’s election results. The people voted, the ballots were tallied, and the masses came out on top.
But that does not mean I have to be okay with it. Sure, this is a democracy, a form of government I fully support – the fairest, most populist form you could ask for. But last week’s public vote to repeal LD 1020 and ban gay marriage in Maine made my faith wane. I’m beginning to have serious doubts.
Like many advocates of LD 1020, I was surprised by the election results. It’s easy to forget that Portland is as insular as it is progressive – a ultra-liberal city, 73 percent of which voted to support gay marriage. In this town, liberality is the law, and the conservative viewpoint is a marginalized peep that gets lost in the din of political discourse. Times like this bring home just how large and diverse Maine is.
In trying to give the results a state-wide context, I looked to my hometown of Auburn. I was disappointed, although not terribly surprised, to learn that Auburn and neighboring Lewiston turned out to be a “Yes on 1” stronghold, voting 54 and 59 percent, respectively, to repeal LD 1020. I don’t feel that I’m particularly cut off from my roots, so it’s been a struggle for me to understand how, in a city just a short hop up I-95, political and moral judgments could be so different.
An election-night call from my dad, who voted in favor of repealing LD1020, cleared things up a bit. “You know what really sealed it for me,” he said, “was the stance the Catholic church took.” Well, okay – one of Maine’s largest metropolitan areas was roused by it’s faith and voted along religious lines. That conclusion sat fine with me until I started to examine it a little closer.
L-A has a large Catholic French-Canadian community, one that I can trace my lineage back to. My grandmother grew up in the “Little Canada” neighborhood of Lewiston. My childhood church lies along Lewiston’s Main Street and was frequented by the grey-haired “memes” of yore, so I feel as if I am relatively in touch with this side of the community.
But in recent years, attendance in L-A’s Catholic churches has fallen off so drastically that they had to consolidate their Sunday masses and have even started closing churches altogether. This included my childhood church, St. Joseph’s, the same church that Valerie Dumont, the activist mother of Ray Dumont, talked about leaving in this fall’s No on 1 television ads.
Given the decreasing power of the church in the L-A community, I can’t help but question the argument that the Catholic church is to blame for the citizens of central Maine voting to repeal gay marriage. The fault can’t lie entirely with the religious institutions: their influence is waning. What’s more likely is that the arbitrary and intolerant lines that those institutions drew between different sects of people persist and still exert a lot of control over our actions, long after the institutions themselves lose their prominence.
People are using their religious affiliation to disguise their own bigotry, claiming that their ideals and votes are influenced by their devotion to the church and not by their own deep-seeded intolerance and fear. To let something as important as a civil right be decided by a population so mired in hate, misinformation and antiquated rhetoric is a dangerous proposition that leads me to doubt the democratic process that forms the cornerstone of our society.
The Maine legislature, an educated and professional body, objectively collected facts and assessed opinions, which they churned into the legislation that became LD 1020. They made a bold and decisive statement about the progressive, tolerant, enlightened nature of our state. Last spring, when this legislation passed, I was proud to be a Mainer.
This week, I was not. – Matt Dodge