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Christian Civic League Hosts Legislative Candidates for Meet and Greet

Candidates for the Maine Legislature in the Penobscot County area were invited today by the Christian Civic League of Maine for a meet and greet on social and political issues.

Democrats and Republicans used the event to explain why they were running for office, and members of the faith community advised them that religious freedom and pro-life positions continue to be paramount issues for their congregations.

Church and state converged at the Calvary Chapel in Orrington, where current and prospective lawmakers of all political stripes met with pastors from churches in Penobscot and Piscataquis counties to outline their agendas for the next legislative session.

Carroll Conley, executive director of the candidates event, says most of the politicians understand that the pastors are primarily concerned with two issues: religious freedom and an unswerving opposition to abortion.

“We had the candidates, we gave them a couple of minutes — and as candidates and preachers do they too more than a couple of minutes — to talk about who they were and why they were running, and knowing that most of them either have a record or a public statement that is in support of the life issue, which is kind of the main thing that was probably what all of these folks have in common, just to talk about why they were running for public office,” Conley says.

League Board Chairman and Pastor Bob Emrich says a pro-life position is a bedrock principle in choosing political candidates among members of his congregation at the Emmanuel Bible Baptist Church in Plymouth.

Emrich, a former GOP chief of staff in the Maine Senate, knows how to organize a pro-life campaign, and mustered support for Bruce Poliquin’s 2nd Congressional District bid two years ago based largely on that single issue.

“We’re not going to ban all abortions outright — not yet,” Emrich says. “Whatever the federal government does, the state still has a lot of authority and responsibility to regulate. Abortion clinics are unregulated right now. They need to be taken care of. We need to help provide services, we need to encourage faith-based services to provide for unwed mothers for example. There’s lots of things that are related to that that the state can do.”

“So, Mr. Emrich’s assertion that abortion clinics are unregulated is simply untrue,” says Eliza Townsend, executive director of the Maine Women’s Lobby in Augusta.

Townsend says spiritual leaders and politicians need to realize that all women’s health centers offer a range of services, of which abortion counseling is only one. Townsend, a former state Democratic lawmaker, says the centers are actually regulated and that a Texas law that sought to make abortions more difficult on that basis was recently struck down on by the U.S. Supreme Court.

“In their ruling, the Supreme Court went so far as to say that essentially the lawmakers in Texas simply could not make up their own facts and that in order for a law to stand it would have to be based in reality,” Townsend says. “The same would be the case here in Maine.”

For politicians attending the event at the Calvary Baptist Church, the message was clear: If they’re not pro-life now and expect league members to work for their elections, they will be soon.