Victoria Eleftheriou (left) and Carla Hopkins (right) with their son Eli at a January press conference where Maine Senator Dennis Damon introduced gay marriage legislation in Maine.

By: Catherine Lussenhop

The sting from the passage of Proposition 8 may have faded a bit, but both sides of the gay marriage debate have been out in force for a similar fight in another location: Maine. In May, Governor John Baldacci signed a bill allowing gay marriage into law, despite his personal past opposition to it.

"I have followed closely the debate on this issue,” the Governor told the Maine Senate and House of Representatives. “I have listened to both sides, as they have presented their arguments during the public hearing and on the floor of the Maine Senate and the House of Representatives. I have read many of the notes and letters sent to my office, and I have weighed my decision carefully.”

Just as in California, family values groups immediately swept in to oppose the measure. Opponents collected the necessary signatures to turn the fate of the law over to Maine’s voters. Now on Tuesday, November 3, Maine voters will go to the polls to vote on Question 1, which asks voters if they want to reject the new law allowing same-sex marriage. Interestingly, “Stand for Marriage Maine” and California’s “Yes on 8” campaign are more similar than one might expect for two organizations separated by the entire continental United States.

It gets less surprising when you realize that the same person is behind both campaigns. The Yes on 8 campaign hired Frank Schubert of Schubert Flint Public Affairs to manage their efforts. His work, combined with an enormous influx of donations from the Church of the Latter-Day Saints, received credit for Proposition 8’s 52-48 victory. Now Frank Schubert is managing Maine’s “Yes on 1” campaign, and the similarities are eerie.

Schubert recycled some of the TV ads that aired in California. In fact, he changed hardly anything. One of the ads features a Massachusetts couple, Robb and Robin Wirthlin, talking about how their son’s teacher read “King and King,” a book about two princes who get married, to the class. “He’s in second grade!” Robin Wirthlin exclaims of her son in the ad.

Maine’s version is largely the same as California’s. It does feature some urgent, dramatic music and a different teacher than the California ad. In the Maine ad, Charla Bansley, identified only as “Teacher”, explains that the gay marriage law has “everything to do with schools.”

While the ad implies that Bansley is a public school teacher who might actually be affected if there were some of sort of change in Maine’s curriculum (which there would not be), she is actually a teacher at a private Christian school. She also heads the Maine chapter of Concerned Women for America, spoke at a “TEA Party” rally, and once tried to get a student expelled for writing a pro-gay marriage letter to the Bangor Daily News as part of a class project.

Schubert and his team probably figured they had succeeded once and could use the same recipe to succeed again. Fred Karger of Californians Against Hate told Arkansas Channel 5 News, "It's almost a carbon copy of what we saw in California, where the right to same-sex marriage was given ... and now the same people are just hell-bent on taking away that right. It's a boilerplate campaign."

Will the similarities unfold just as in California? Will the Maine electorate vote to strike down the marriage law? The similarities may end soon, as there are some important differences between the two states. Maine is considerably less religious than California, and while Catholics in Maine are donating heavily to “Yes on 1,” it’s nothing like the influx of dollars from the LDS Church in California. Still, polls show that the race is close. A recent PPP poll has the tally split at 48-48, and famous pollster Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com aggregated and weighted five polls and came up with a tally of 49 percent against, 45.7 percent in favor of Question 1.

But in the midst of the nasty fight, a touching video has begun making the rounds on the Internet. It happened in April during the hearings on marriage in Maine, but it hits just as hard now. Philip Spooner, an 86-year-old WWII veteran, got up to speak and told the story of a polling place worker who asked if he believed in equality for gay and lesbian people. He didn’t know what to say for a moment, but then responded, “What do you think our boys fought for at Omaha Beach?” He went on to the crowd: “These are the values that give America a great nation, one worth dying for."

Supporters of marriage equality in Maine and all over the country can hope that the Philip Spooners of the world with prevail over the Charla Bansleys and Frank Schuberts, but only time will tell.