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With less than two months to go before the Nov. 3 vote in Maine, both Yes on 1 and No on 1 campaigns fill the airwaves with television and radio advertisements.

One week after gay-marriage supporters rolled out two commercials urging people to reject the veto and leave the state’s same-sex marriage law in place, one of the ads featuring a father who talks about having a lesbian daughter, and the other a teenager who talks about having lesbian parents, the Yes on 1 campaign, which supports the repeal of the state’s gay-marriage law, began airing its first round of ads.

Consequences, a 30-second spot released by gay-marriage opponents featuring Boston College School of Law professor Scott FitzGibbon, says the new law will lead to lawsuits, churches could lose their tax-exempt status and gay marriage could be taught in schools without parents being notified in advance.

Rev. Bob Emrich, one of the repeal leaders, says “Changing the law means you change the culture, and it becomes part of everything. It then becomes the standard”, while gay-marriage supporters disagree:
“Question 1 has nothing to do with schools or education,” said Jesse Connolly, campaign manager for the No on 1 campaign. “This is nothing more than a scare tactic. Mainers will see through these forecasts of doom.”

As Dr. Daniel Summers of the American Academy of Pediatrics testified at the April hearing in Augusta:
“It is the quality of parenting that predicts children’s psychological and social adjustment, not the parents’ sexual orientation or gender” and children raised by same-sex couples “do not differ in any important respect from those raised by heterosexual parents.”

Until Nov. 3, when we decide whether we maintain the freedom to marry or we choose to ban it and interfere with others’ personal lives, both sides are expected to release new ads.

Watch the spots below.

No on 1 – Protect Maine equality:

Yes on 1 ad: