| Last Updated:
Oct 22, 2009 - 3:04:39 PM |
As the election season moves into its final month many Maine citizens are wondering about the future for families in the Pine Tree State. As the consequences of birth control, easy divorce and gay rights settle into the culture the future of the traditional family is in doubt.
Trends throughout the west indicate that co-habitation and "hooking up" have replaced courtship and dating. While isolated conservative Christian communities still nurture these traditional American forms they appear all but dead in the broader culture.
League director Mike Heath says that his hope is in Jesus, so he is optimistic that things will turn around. "My hope is found in nothing less than Jesus blood and righteousness." he said.
There are concerned people working to defend marriage. A group of citizens is banding together to form a Marriage Alliance. They hope to push a constitutional amendment through the Legislature in 2009. The measure would also have to pass muster with the public in a statewide vote. Some constitutionalists object to the proposal arguing that the constitution is sacrosanct.
While the League supports the Alliance League director Mike Heath believes that nothing positive is going to happen unless a powerful sector aligns with the traditional marriage movement by contributing at least a half million dollars before the end of the year. Evangelical Christians and churches have formed the only substantive resistance to liberalizing pressures on the family in Maine over the past two decades. Their power has declined to where it is no longer enough.
Heath says it is even questionable whether there is sufficient power left in Maine's conservative movement to stop the well-funded gay rights movement from winning either same sex marriage or civil unions next year.
"The Catholic Church, a significant force within the Maine Democrat Party, is silent," said Heath. "As far as I know they are doing nothing politically to advance either the pro life or pro family cause."
While the League has won two squeakers on gay rights without the Chancery, and while fighting every other institutional force in Maine, the ministry lost the last statewide battle in 2005.
Earlier this year the League floated a referendum proposal that was cancelled for lack of funding, church and activist support.
"The other side has adopted the strategy of shooting the messenger and the politics of personal destruction," said Rev. Dallas Henry, outgoing President of the League's board of directors. "Working in concert with Maine's liberal media the left has tried to demonize our executive director, Mike Heath."
Henry allowed that the tactic hasn't worked. Heath is often acknowledged as politically influential by both friend and foe.
"We should listen to Mike," said Henry. "He is a man of integrity who has risked his career to help Maine move in a common sense direction with respect to human sexuality, family formation and morality."
Maine's courts created homosexual adoption out of whole cloth in 2006. Civil marriage is likely to be radically redefined by either the courts or the legislature in the next couple years.
The only force realistically capable of stopping it doesn't exist right now. Money is the missing piece of the political calculus. Christian businessmen and larger Christian churches could change that overnight. They have allowed themselves to be sidelined by forces in Maine that want gay rights and abortion.
Heath said that it isn't willpower, or popularity, that is destroying the traditional family culture in Maine. He believes that most Mainers are pro-marriage and pro-life when they understand the issues.
Liberal obfuscation and sin confuse everyone, he said.
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