How to Respond Respectfully to Frequently Asked Questions - General
Marriage is about supporting two people who make a lifelong commitment to each other. There are thousands of committed same-sex couples living in Maine, many of whom have been together for decades. These couples have weathered life-threatening illness, are raising children, worry about their finances, and do their best to plan for the future. They deserve the legal protections that come only come from a legal marriage.
Some people support giving legal protections to same-sex couples, but want to call it something else. The problem is that if you call it something else, it is something else. Only marriage tells the wider community that two people are committed to each other and are a family. Same-sex couples need this as much as opposite-sex couples do.
Children can and do thrive in many kinds of families. More importantly, scientific consensus is that children raised by gay and lesbian parents do not differ in any important respects from those raised by heterosexual parents. It is the quality of parenting that predicts children’s psychological and social adjustment, not the parent’s sexual orientation or gender.
Maine’s marriage laws have no relationship to the state’s curriculum guidelines. Long before the same-sex marriage law passed in Maine, some schools chose to include and acknowledge the existence of gay and lesbian families. In these cases, school officials decided it was important to teach students to be respectful of the families of their classmates. These schools teach students how to behave towards their classmates, not what to believe.
Maine’s same-sex marriage law explicitly affirms religious freedom and guarantees that no church will be required to recognize or perform same-sex marriages. While the state of Maine has authority to determine which couples can receive a civil marriage license, churches will continue to be free to define marriage according to their own beliefs.
