People in the US state of Maine have used their ballot box to reject a bill, which would allow same-sex ‘marriage’. The legalisation of the homosexual unions has now been refused in all 31 states where the issue has been put directly to the electorate.
The ‘people’s veto’ was the biggest defeat for same-sex unions since California, Arizona, Florida and Hawaii expressly banned homosexual ‘marriage’ last year. The result showed once again that when the same-sex rights agenda is dealt with in a proper democratic way, the support of the mainstream society for traditional marriage prevails – even in liberal and ‘progressive’ societies. Homosexual ‘marriage’ has not yet won a popular vote in any US state.
By contrast, in the states of Massachusetts, Connecticut and Iowa, where homosexual ‘marriages’ are currently available, this situation was not the result of a people's vote leading to a democratic legislative process, but of highly controversial judicial decisions adopted by the Supreme Courts of these states.
After the bill in Maine was voted down, hundreds gathered on a small stage at the Eastland Park Hotel behind Frank Schubert of Schubert Flint, the public relations firm hired to work on the campaign.
Frank Schubert, chief organiser for the campaign to preserve the family, said:
‘I am very proud to tell you tonight that Question 1 has passed. Thank you so much to the people of Maine and to the thousands of volunteers who have worked day in and day out. It has all come together tonight.
‘The institution of marriage has been preserved in Maine and across this nation,’ he added.
Marc Mutty, of Stand for Marriage Maine Campaign, said:
‘What a team we’ve had. We’ve worked hard. We’ve struggled, we’ve worked against tremendous odds, as we’ve all known. It’s been the little guy against the big guy in terms of resources, financial resources.
‘We prevailed because the people of Maine, the silent majority, the folks back home spoke with their vote tonight,’ he added.
The defeat was seen as a major setback for homosexual ‘rights’ advocates.
The push to legalize same-sex marriage in Maine began in January 2009, when hundreds of homosexual activists gathered at the State House to announce that Democrat Party Senator Dennis Damon, of Trenton, would sponsor a bill to change the definition of marriage. The bill defined marriage as ‘the legally recognized union of two people’ rather than ‘the union of one man and one woman joined in traditional monogamous marriage’, a definition put in place by the Legislature. If passed, it would allow any two people to apply for a marriage license ‘regardless of the sex of each person’. The voters rejected such a proposition.
Dr Jakob Cornides, an international human rights lawyer and academic from Brussels, wrote in his article that Supreme Courts of both Massachusetts and Connecticut found that ‘the obligation to recognise same-sex marriage was in some way already mandated by existing constitutional law, but failed to explain why the hidden sense of the constitutional provisions used for that purpose had never been discovered in the decades or centuries before.’
‘As it turns out,’ Dr Cornides continued, ‘the same-sex rights agenda is imposed on an unwilling majority through a judicial putsch, in a way that definitely reminds of the US Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade Decision. The support this agenda enjoys in the broader public appears to be, at best, very limited.’
In Vermont, where the same-sex 'marriage' was legalised by the decision of lawmakers, the bill passed just five votes short of the two-thirds majority needed in the 150-member body to override a gubernatorial veto. Matt Staver, president and general counsel of Liberty Counsel who also serves as dean of the Liberty University School of Law, said the Vermont vote appeared to be the result of pressure from members of the homosexual lobby. He told Radio America:
'The majority of people in Vermont support marriage as for one man and one woman but they did not show up when they should. I believe it is a sad day.'
He said that, overall in the country, there is an overwhelming wave in one direction - the marriage should be between a man and a woman.
In November 2008 election, 62 percent of the voters in Florida and majorities in Arizona and California installed the traditional definition of marriage in their constitutions.
Despite the huge opposition, President Barak Obama failed to adequately represent the views and moral convictions of the people in promoting laws despite, not because of, the majority opinion. In his speech on 10 October 2009, Obama addressed a crowd of nearly ecstatic fans saying that homosexual unions are equivalent to marriage.
He promised those assembled for the Banquet of the ‘Human Rights Campaign’, the leading homosexual activist organization in US:
‘You will see a time in which we as a nation finally recognise relationships between two men or two women as just as real and admirable as relationships between a man and a woman.’
(Click here to watch the speech)
In March this year, Prime Minister Gordon Brown described the voting down the same-sex ‘marriage’ in California as ‘unacceptable’. ‘What I saw in America tells me what we have got to do,’ Mr Brown said.
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