Supporters of same-sex “marriage”, led by the group Equality Maine in Portland, plan to announce next week whether they will submit signatures needed to place a question on the Pine Tree State ballot this November. Betsy Smith, executive director of the group, said that they had collected nearly twice as many as needed to qualify.
The group says they will not move forward with the campaign if they don’t believe that they are “well-positioned to win.” They hope to avoid another loss like the one in 2009 when voters rejected same-sex “marriage” by a margin of 53 percent to 47 percent after it was approved by the legislatures and signed by the former governor. In 2010, Republicans took control of the government, making it highly unlikely that another law would originate in the legislature.
Bob Emrich, a pastor at the Emmanuel Bible Baptist Church in Plymouth, helped lead Stand for Marriage Maine, the group that spearheaded the campaign against the law in 2009. The organization won’t regroup unless Equality Maine gets the issue on the ballot, which he said he thinks is likely to happen.
“What we’ve been doing is building the network and expanding grassroots connections to people in Maine and talking to people around the country,” Emrich said. “We need to be ready so when this starts, we hit the ground running.”
Source: Bloomberg