The following column by Mike Heath, Executive Director of the Christian Civic League/Maine Family Policy Council, recently appeared in the Brunswick Times Record. The column sheds light on the issue of same sex marriage.

Of Lincoln’s many wise sayings, this is the wisest: “I cannot imagine a man who looks at the sky for five minutes then denies there is a God.”

A man I know once watched a small solitary cloud descend from a clear sky, then move steadily and purposefully over the green hills until it reached a patch of brown, parched forest. There it stopped, as if it had found its goal, and poured out a draft of cool, life-giving water.

It indeed requires a child-like faith to see the hand of an All-mighty Father at work in healing an injured part of his Creation.

Modern man no longer watches the sky, as did former generations. Busy with work and entertainment, we are indifferent to the shining panorama above us, and the deeper meaning of the sky is left to poets, dreamers and philosophers.

But in recent days, we are all taking more notice of the sky for the simple reason that all is not well with the weather. Friends known for their high-spirits seem remote and gloomy. Our gardens droop low as if worn out and saddened.  Bird and beast stay close to home, and when they do venture out, they too, seem peevish and sullen.

What is missing is the sun, God’s emblem of cheerfulness and benevolence.

Our crops are faring like our moods. The potato crop is blighted, and corn and fruit fields wither. In one historic building in Augusta, rain flooded the basement, as water from another source poured down through the ceiling and extinguished a century-old chandelier.

Few people would be bold enough to suggest the cause of the endless rain and gloom, that the moral climate in Maine has caused the sun to hide its face in shame.

Worse than the rain is the fact that Maine voted in homosexual “marriage.”

In May, our elected officials overturned a law of nature, and in its place paid honor to evil and unnatural practices. Our leaders allowed a cloud of error to hide the light of reason, and then the rain began. How fitting that this eclipse of human reason is mirrored by the disappearance of the sun!

What darkness equals the error of saying a family should be headed by two mothers or two fathers? What error equals saying that two women can be married, or two men? I am not saying that homosexuals or the gay rights movement are to blame for the weather. Far from it!

The fault lies with a refractory governor and Legislature who imposed an immoral law on our people.

Another quote by Lincoln is pertinent here. He said, “The best way to repeal a bad law is to strictly enforce it.” The public still does not know how strictly special rights for homosexuals are enforced. The average citizen does not know that a business in Maine recently lost a costly lawsuit after it prevented a transvestite from using the lady’s room.

Nor do they know that the government forced a middle school to allow a fifth-grade boy to use the girls’ bathroom. The school offered a just and reasonable compromise that allowed the boy to use the teachers’ bathroom.

Instead, the Human Rights Commission ordered the school to let the boy use the girls’ room. This was done over the strong objections of both the school administrators and parents.

Clearly, it is not the homosexuals who are being discriminated against. It is the average citizen, the school teacher, the businessman, the pastor or physician who is being hauled before courts, fined and, in some cases, imprisoned.

In modern America, it is not the homosexual who is persecuted, it is the person of conscience.

In one case in Massachusetts, a father was handcuffed and sent to jail after he went to his son’s elementary school to protest the radical homosexual agenda. Attacks on houses of worship are increasing in number and intensity, and the attacks are being mounted by those who make a tearful appeal for “tolerance” and “equality.”

Such incidents are completely ignored by so-called “hate crimes” organizations.

The novelist Arthur Koestler wrote a book about this sort of lawless authoritarianism, and he called it “Darkness at Noon,” a perfect metaphor for the eclipse of human reason and decency.

America has seen nothing comparable to Stalin’s show trials … yet.

But we are experiencing one long, interminable dark and dreary summer.