FARMINGTON -- Maine is an amazing place, especially in the fall. Millions of hardwoods turn the deeply forested state into a riot of gold, orange and yellow against an evergreen backdrop.
Warming currents have pushed the lobster habitat northward, making Maine’s world-famous crustacean harvest even richer.
Dotted with islands, bays and inlets, Maine’s coastline is actually longer than California’s.
And speaking of California, Maine seems well on track to be New England’s version of the Left Coast – full of natural wonders and nutcases. Progressive Democrats are currently in the driver’s seat.
Maine is one of the only states with ranked-choice voting, a wacky system that almost certainly cost Republican U.S. Rep. Bruce Poliquin re-election in 2018.
Maine, which now has four Electoral College votes, splits them. The north congressional district dominated by potato-growing Aroostook County gave President Trump one electoral vote in both 2016 and 2020. The southern district, which includes Portland, the state’s largest city, voted for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. Portland is a sanctuary city for illegal aliens and has a growing homeless problem.
The state has two Democrat Congress members and independent U.S. Sen. Angus King, who caucuses with Democrats. The outlier is Republican U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, who was first elected to the Senate in 1996 and was last re-elected in 2020.
Democrats have controlled Maine’s House since 2013, and have an 82-67 advantage, with two independents. They have controlled the Senate and governorship since 2019 and now have a 22-13 margin and the offices of attorney general and secretary of state.
They appear to be doing their best to put former Republican Gov. Paul LePage’s fiscal conservatism behind them and put Maine in the vanguard of former President Obama’s dream of radically transforming America into a Marxist version of Sodom and Gomorrah.
As the state lurches leftward, observers might wonder whether there’s something in the air.
As a matter of fact, the smell of weed can be overpowering. Recreational marijuana has been sold legally in the Pine Tree State since 2020. Cannabis outlets are everywhere.
Planned Parenthood, which has poured buckets of money into Maine, strong-armed wavering Democrats in September into enacting the nation’s most radical abortion law, allowing the killing right up through live birth.
Earlier this month, Gov. Janet Mills also signed a bill decriminalizing the selling of sex. Not the buying, just the selling. Buying it is still illegal. You can sell it until the cows come home.
This is somehow supposed to fight sex trafficking.
“The point of this whole thing is to decrease the demand for commercial sex,” said the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Lois Reckitt (D-South Portland).
She says the new law will make it easier for police to crack down on pimps. “Now they’re going to have to arrest the johns and lean on them to find out where the trafficking is coming from,” she told the Washington Post.
So, the “customers” looking for a paid quickie are more likely to know who’s behind the trafficking than the women who are being trafficked? Just asking. Wonder if they’ll next tackle the deadly fentanyl problem this way.
Police agencies, which opposed the new law, report that one immediate result is that they are less able to bring vulnerable girls or women into protective custody.
In July, Mills signed a law allowing 16-and-17-year-olds to obtain gender transition treatments without parents’ consent.
The legislature is now reviewing a bill (HP 1114) to take custody from out-of-state parents who oppose a child’s getting sex transition drugs or surgeries in Maine. The proposal also states that a child cannot be taken from parents who support gender transitions. This is upside down and evil.
The chief sponsor is Rep. Laurie Osher, a Democrat who represents the 25th District, which includes the University of Maine in Orono. She leads the Progressive Women's Caucus and the LGBTQ+ Equality Caucus. And, yes, there’s a California connection; she has a Ph.D. in Soil Science from UC Berkeley.
All this aside, not everybody in Maine has lost his or her marbles.
As in other places around the country, a growing number of traditionalists are trying to restore the remnants of a once-fiercely independent society based on faith, family, personal responsibility, frugality and common sense.
One of them is Lisa Keim (R-Oxford), the Senate assistant minority leader. She said that she and others are appalled by the cultural blitzkrieg.
“It’s a full-on war on our children to destroy them,” she told me. “It isn’t just to take them from us. It’s to destroy them. Parents are being pushed out of life-altering decisions.”
Sen. Keim says she believes that “people are waking up because of what is happening to children.”
Though greatly outnumbered in Augusta, she says she and others will keep on fighting because, “God instituted government, and so what we do matters.”
I asked her for other signs of hope in Maine, and she said simply, “Our hope is in God.”
We know that God works wonders. As a native Mainer, I pray that will happen soon.
This article appeared originally here.
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