Why Question 6 failed

We shouldn’t have been so surprised. Yes on 6 ran a campaign that could raise neither money nor voters’ consciousness about discrimination against gays.

By Sam Smith

Like nearly everyone, Paul Volle was surprised by the outcome of Question 6. The executive director of the Christian Coalition of Maine headed the opposition to the civil-rights referendum, a measure that supporters — and many opponents — considered a sure thing. As we know, the referendum lost by a razor-thin margin — just under 5000 votes — leaving Maine as the only New England state without a law protecting gays and lesbians from discrimination.

But unlike many, Volle wasn’t surprised by the referendum’s loss, per se — he was surprised by the size of his win.

“We didn’t win by as much as I thought we would,” says the political tortoise. “I thought we’d have a more comfortable margin.”

Volle surprised his opponents in 1997 when his group, along with the Christian Civic League of Maine, gathered enough signatures to force a people’s veto of the civil-rights law granting protection from discrimination to gays and lesbians, which had only just been signed by the governor. He surprised gay-rights advocates further when, despite polls showing that the veto would be defeated, it succeeded in February of 1998.

Volle, it seems, has been underestimated once again.

But just as it is dangerous to overlook the Christian Coalition and its highly effective political machine, it would be wrong to give them full credit for defeating Question 6. Yes, Volle won; but the Yes on 6 campaign lost.

And perhaps the only thing more startling than the loss itself is how easily the mistakes of the campaign now rise to the surface. Of course hindsight is 20/20, but there’s more to it than that: Yes on 6 was working with blinders on. As opportunities were squandered, as fundraising deadlines were missed, a new set of polling figures would show up — Yes on 6’s own polls showed the measure winning with more than 60 percent of the vote — and the false sense of security would return: Yes on 6 thought that there was simply no way the referendum could

lose. (Well, we all thought that, didn’t we.)

And now, as the gay and lesbian community once again licks its wounds, Volle and his team are planning their offensive.

“I don’t know of any military force or sports team that’s just been instructed in the art of defense that’s ever won,” says Volle. “There’s only so long you can go with this live-and-let-live and trying to accommodate people.”

Volle is currently meeting with legislators to lay plans for a variety of “pro-family” bills, including a repeal of Maine’s hate-crimes law, restrictions on adoption by gays and lesbians, and a halt to state funding of domestic-partner benefits (on this, he points specifically to the University of Southern Maine).

And as for the legislature trying to submit any civil-rights bills in the next session, “I hope they do,” says Volle. “It would help us tremendously. I mean, how arrogant are these people? What part of ‘no’ do you not understand?”

The Catholic compromise “THE QUESTION of exemptions was a nightmare,” says the Roman Catholic Diocese’s Mark Mutty. Mutty helped negotiate a religious exemption into the bill that Question 6 sought to ratify. DAVID GARRITY, CO-CHAIR of the Yes on 6 executive committee and president of the Maine Lesbian/Gay Political Alliance, says he’s still confused by the backlash over an alliance he helped broker with the Catholic Church. That alliance got Catholic-approved religious exemptions added to the civil-rights bill that Question 6 sought to ratify. “There was always a religious exemption,” he says. “It was in every bill over the last 10 years.” To illustrate this, he points to the language of the civil-rights bill that was passed in 1997 and vetoed by the people in 1998, which contains the language “except that a religious corporation, association, or organization is exempt from these provisions.” “All we did was specify what was intended by those old bills,” Garrity says. And he says there had to be something unique about this bill to convince the legislature that the issue needed to be addressed so soon after ‘98. Catholic-approved language was unique. If some don’t understand, he says, “there is really unrealistic thinking about what one can expect from the legislature after one is voted down by the public.” But whether Garrity understands the backlash or not, he recognizes its impact on the Yes on 6 campaign. “It dulled the enthusiasm that we would have expected to emerge,” he says. And for a campaign that was already struggling to find volunteers who weren’t already working for the Gore campaign, this early lack of support was deadly. But security in moving the bill through the legislature wasn’t the only benefit Garrity and others expected from the alliance with the church. With the Catholic Church on board, supporters thought, the monopoly the religious right holds on arguments of morality would be broken. Plus, brokers of the deal thought it would mean a deeper reach into rural areas of Maine as the church spread the word about its support of Question 6. But the support from the church never translated into rank-and-file Catholics’ actually supporting the referendum as the campaign had hoped. Exact numbers are impossible to come by, but a look at results in traditionally Catholic voting districts tells the story. In the heavily Catholic rural districts of Aroostook County, Question 6 failed miserably. In towns like Madawaska, Saint Agatha, and Frenchville it failed by nearly a two-to-one margin. But even in more urban Catholic districts throughout Lewiston, Question 6 failed. Although the margin was much tighter than in the rural areas of Aroostook County (and much tighter than in the special election from February of 1998), the Catholics couldn’t pull the “yes” numbers high enough. The tally from Lewiston’s 15 districts was 7292 “yes” votes to 8226 “no” votes. Marc Mutty, director of public affairs for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland, knew from the start it would be “a toss-up” whether Catholics would support the measure. “I knew this was going to be a tough sell,” says Mutty, who represented the church in negotiations over the bill. “When I would try to explain it to the people, they would say, ‘Well, if you can support this bill, then why are you exempting yourself from it?’ The question of exemptions was a nightmare.” But even supporters within the Catholic Church, like Mutty, couldn’t dedicate themselves to the campaign; the issue of physician-assisted suicide — Question 1 — occupied the bulk of their time. And as far as breaking the religious right’s hold on the moral high ground, that seems to have failed as well. According to Paul Volle, executive director of the Christian Coalition of Maine, the compromise drove many Catholics to his side. “The Diocese really managed to tick off a lot of its parishioners,” says Volle. “To the people in the pews, the Diocese position couldn’t be reconciled with the position of the pope.” Further, says Volle, the alliance with the Catholic Church represented a strategic misstep by the Yes on 6 campaign. “At the same time the church was trying to get people out to vote for Question 6, they were trying to get those same people out to vote on Question 1. Well, the folks who voted against Question 1 are the same folks who vote with us [on Question 6]. The Church was in an untenable position, and I think they lost a lot of credibility because of it.” — SS

Back to the beginning

The seeds of the Yes on 6 campaign — and its defeat — were planted on February 10, 1998, when the people’s veto of the state’s new civil-rights law succeeded. Following that special election, various gay-rights groups organized statewide meetings to discuss the loss and to begin planning the next step. The Maine Lesbian/Gay Political Alliance (MLGPA) organized a monthly meeting in Bangor; this series of meetings would ultimately lead to formation of the Maine Coalition for Equal Rights and the Yes on 6 campaign.

A number of assumptions were made at that time about why the veto passed; one of the most widely accepted explanations was the low turnout. Only about 300,000 people voted in the special election; if the vote had been held during a general election — or, better still, during a presidential election — civil rights for gays and lesbians would have been protected, supporters thought.

Another assumption rationalizing the loss centered on Maine Won’t Discriminate, the campaign organization leading the opposition to the people’s veto. Critics argued that MWD had ignored the rural areas of the state; the organization had been too Portland-centric and had lost the election because of it. That was the most fundamental criticism of the organization, but it wasn’t the only one: MWD had started too late; it hadn’t raised enough cash; the cash it raised wasn’t maximized; it diluted itself on favorable polls; it never embraced the gay and lesbian community; it never attacked the opposition on its empty (but maddeningly potent) “special rights” rhetoric. By the time its evisceration was completed, MWD had lost a great deal of credibility.

Although there was general agreement on this rationale for the loss in 1998, there was no consensus regarding an appropriate course of action.

“When those meetings were taking place in 1998, a number of us thought 2000 was too soon to try to pass legislation,” says Naomi Falcone, who was motivated by the ’98 loss to start the Maine Rural Network, a statewide outreach group dedicated to educating Mainers about the need for civil rights. “Education is a long-term process,” she says.

But with strong support from some legislators who were anxious to see another civil-rights bill, and with the feeling that if the bill went to referendum it would have the greatest chance of passing during a presidential election, gay-rights advocates decided to move toward 2000. In December of ’98, the Maine Coalition for Equal Rights was formed.

The rural reach

Early in ’99, it became clear that the legislature and governor would not support a bill unless it went to referendum, and so a campaign was necessary. Wanting to avoid the “Portland-centric” criticisms that hounded MWD — and the lack of support in rural areas that sank the ’98 effort — the Maine Coalition for Equal Rights held planning sessions around the state throughout the year. The hope was to give “ownership” of the campaign to as many as possible in the gay and lesbian community. Ultimately, the coalition hoped, this would translate into a network of autonomous county campaigners who would carry out the kind of grassroots-education effort that was missing in ’98.

“We wanted something that had media, but was equally focused, financially and in terms of personnel resources, to do grassroots and community organizing,” says David Garrity, co-chair of the Maine Coalition for Equal Rights’s executive committee, president of MLGPA, and a veteran of Maine’s equal-rights struggle.

The blueprint for this grassroots network — as laid out in an MLGPA-sponsored training session in January 2000 — called for up to three county coordinators in every county in the state. These coordinators would develop campaign plans specific to their locale and would develop a team of volunteers consisting of a “captain,” 10 “super-volunteers,” and 10 volunteers. All of these county organizers would be overseen by a field director.

The effort began falling apart almost immediately, and its failure illustrates two fundamental problems in the Yes on 6 effort: a lack of support from the community and (despite a year of organizing) a lack of time to do the job right.

“The [planning session] instilled a sense of failure right from the start,” says Rick Gowen, a past board member of MLGPA who is a longtime contributor to the Maine gay-rights struggle and participated in the January meetings. “We were already behind on meeting deadlines [that were set in the planning session]. That’s where disparities started to grow between what was on paper and what was actually happening.” Those disparities would become even more apparent during fundraising efforts.

Garrity says the situation got worse because in January, efforts were still being directed at passing the civil-rights bill through the legislature. “People had to stop and work on bill passage from February to April,” he says. “It held off the organizing.”

Whatever the case, after a year of statewide planning, Yes on 6 found itself desperately short on time. As a result, like the occupants of most key staff positions in the campaign, the field director overseeing county efforts was hired late; Philadelphian Chris Morris, an alumnus of Maine’s ’98 campaign, didn’t come on board until July.

Without a director’s supervision, volunteers in the field were left to improvise. And they soon began to realize the fallacy of a presidential-election-year advantage: the pool of volunteers had been nearly emptied by the Gore-for-president campaign, and many who had volunteered for the ’98 effort were fatigued.

This lack of support in the field came as a surprise to many in the Yes on 6 camp, including Yes on 6 campaign manager Jeanette Fruen. A veteran of 22 referendum campaigns nationwide (her most recent being the successful 1999 Maine pro-choice-referendum campaign), Fruen has only one defeat on her record: Question 6.

“There is this belief that there are thousands of grassroots volunteers out there ready to work,” she says. “In most cases that’s not true. But I had made the assumption that there were volunteers in the field [for Yes on 6] because the executive committee had been in touch with people around the state for a year.”

But for those in the field, the truth was plain enough. “It was like pulling teeth trying to get people involved,” says Janice Campbell, the coordinator for Oxford county. “People were burned out; they didn’t want to volunteer.”

Early controversy over a religious exemption written into the bill — and the Maine Civil Liberties Union’s withdrawal of support because of it — also dampened the enthusiasm of the gay and lesbian community (see ‘The Catholic compromise,’ pg. 17).

While the Yes on 6 campaign was focusing so strongly on not duplicating the faults of MWD’s ’98 campaign — and developing a very touchy-feely, all-inclusive campaign that attempted to mirror the gay and lesbian community itself — the group lost sight of what MWD did right. MWD was criticized for going too far toward a top-down campaign in ’98, but Yes on 6, it seems, went too far toward a bottom-up model in 2000. And it left a number of campaigners lost.

“In hindsight, I think people wanted more direction,” says Campbell. “[The Yes on 6 executive committee] would just say, ‘This much was raised by MWD at the county level,’ and that was it. We really needed a central organization.”

Page 1 | 2 | Next