A referendum in Maine voting on gay rights.

One might say that the Catholic church has a large presence in Lewiston, Maine. Most of this small city's 41,000 residents are Franco-Americans, products of a wave of French Catholic immigration from Quebec in the early part of this century, which filled the town's bustling textile mills and shoe factories. irish-Americans make up much of the remainder of the population. All told, over 75 percent of the town's residents belong to one of its six Catholic churches, which pop up on the unsuspecting visitor with almost minimarket frequency. So it's not surprising that when a gay-rights battle erupted here last year, the positions and policies of the Catholic church would be front and center, whether the church liked it or not.

The debate started last January, when the city council approved a nondiscrimination ordinance covering sexual orientation. Supporting the ordinance was a group called Equal Protection Lewiston (EPL), led by Lewiston Police Chief Laurent F. Gilbert. Chief Gilbert--who is married, a father of three, and Catholic--seems at first glance an anomalous choice to lead a gay-rights movement. However, the local gay and lesbian community remains very much closeted and without a strong voice. Further, as a twenty-five-year veteran of Lewiston's police force, Gilbert was aware that more than a few gay bashings have occurred over the years in this seemingly sleepy town. That was one of the reasons his department formed a Hate/Bias Crimes Task Force in 1991.

The task force helped improve relations between the town's gay community and the local police. Still, according to local gays, fear remained in reporting violence because they could be discriminated against if their sexual orientation was made public. "I saw this as a cry for help," said Gilbert, "and I responded."

In the fall of 1992, Gilbert and the other members of the Hate/Bias Crimes Task Force drew up a ten-page ordinance "to prevent discrimination in employment, housing, access to public accommodations, or in the extension of credit on account of sexual orientation." Gilbert proposed the ordinance to the council in January '93, and after a heated public debate it was approved by a five-to-two margin.

Then came the opposition, in the form of a group called ACT (All Catholics for Truth). ACT, which soon changed its name to Citizens of Lewiston for the Repeal (COLFR) to broaden its base, succeeded in gathering the requisite signatures to bring the ordinance up for a public referendum. That vote came last November, and the ordinance lost by a two-to-one margin.

Throughout the public debate, the Catholic church, through the Diocese of Portland, maintained a position of "neutrality" on the ordinance. The Reverend Michael Henchal, chancellor of the diocese, said the ordinance was vague as to whether it applied to homosexual orientation only, or whether homosexual behavior also would be covered. Henchal, in fact, eventually backed an amendment drawn up by several local Catholic lawyers to try to clarify this issue. The proposed amendment specified that "the intent of this ordinance is to protect persons against discrimination which is based solely on a status or tendency, not to protect or endorse behavior, whether or not related to such a status or tendency."

The amendment was put aside, however, because the original ordinance was already on the November ballot. Moreover, according to Bryan Dench, who helped draft the amendment's language, the ordinance's supporters were extremely uncomfortable with the changes. "We know they [EPL] wouldn't accept this, because what they wanted was approval of the lifestyle," he said.

Thus, without the amendment, the diocese maintained its neutrality and urged Lewiston's Catholic priests to stay out of the debate, which most did (though four priests went on record in support of the ordinance). Henchal explained the diocese's position in an article published in Lewiston's daily paper shortly before the vote. He wrote that while "the church teaches that all persons are entitled to the exercise of their basic human rights," it was unclear whether the ordinance would "be able to distinguish between [homosexual] orientation, which is not immoral, and [homosexual] behaviors, which are." He added that "the diocese does not judge that this is one of those issues, where the moral principles clearly point to one answer or the other." In conclusion, Henchal encouraged local Catholics "to vote in accord with their [own] judgments."

Despite the neutrality of the diocese and most parish priests, both sides tried hard to show that "The Church" was really on their side. An EPL leaflet, for example, under the heading "Catholic Church Supports Equal Rights for Everyone" quoted the U.S. Catholic bishops' 1976 statement that "homosexual persons, like everyone else, should not suffer from prejudice against their basic human fights." And the leaflet asserted that "while the Catholic church does not tell their faithful how to vote in secular elections, it is clear that the church supports the basic human fights which are the subject of Lewiston's antidiscrimination ordinance." The ordinance's opponents, on the other hand, could refer interested parishioners to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which concluded that homosexual actions are "intrinsically disordered" and "in no case to be approved of."

The moral distinctions the church insists on between homosexual orientation and "behaviors" or sexual acts make it difficult to assess how the large Catholic presence in Lewiston affected the outcome of the referendum. Celeste Branham, a board member of EPL and dean of students at Lewiston's Bates College, characterized the directions given by the Diocese of Portland as "paradoxical" and confusing. But she doesn't think the church's teaching was the source of the ordinance's defeat. "I don't think we lost to the Catholic church," Branham said. "I think we lost to fear."

Specifically, she referred to "scare tactics" used by the ordinance's opponents, such as ads declaring that if passed, the ordinance could lead to "affirmative action for gays" or the imprisonment of psychologists who speak against homosexuality.

But Paul Madore, the chairman of COLFR (and the founder of its predecessor, ACT), said his group didn't view such ads as scare tactics. He claimed that with ordinances like Lewiston's, an employer with a history of past discrimination against gays could be forced by the courts into a kind of affirmative-action rehiring scheme. And he said that in Canada, those who criticize homosexuality on mental health grounds can be brought to trial for violating that country's hate-crime law. "They call these scare tactics, but we saw them as the next step," Madore said.

Moreover, Madore believes that with or without these ads the ordinance would have been rejected. The town's voters, he said, didn't buy EPL's argument that the ordinance was limited to discrimination only, and that it wouldn't lend a stamp of approval to homosexuality. "The law, as it was written, had a great deal of bite in it," Madore said. "That is the element that ignited the kind of opposition that the gay rights movement incurred in Lewiston." Madore insisted, however, that he and other Catholics in town have no ill will toward homosexuals. He added, "I think that the response that any practicing Catholic would have toward a homosexual would be a charitable response."

Charity aside, Madore and his group are clearly emboldened by the success of their repeal effort. "The gay-rights movement has suffered a significant defeat here in Lewiston," he said. "I think that the state legislators in Augusta who had thought that Maine was ripe for a gay-rights law will be compelled by the results in Lewiston to reconsider." Celeste Branham of EPL, in turn, said that her group will have to focus on nonlegislative strategies to achieve its aims. Her group plans to approach organizations such as the Chamber of Commerce and the local landlords' association, asking them to adopt nondiscrimination policies.

Meanwhile, life in Lewiston goes on. Don Plourde, one of the few local gays to speak publicly in support of the ordinance, now speaks about leaving town. "After all that's happened here, I'm thinking of moving to Portland," he said upon closing up for the night the office of the Androscoggin Valley AIDS Coalition (AVAC), hidden in an unassuming, weathered row house just outside of downtown. Plourde, who is president of the coalition and himself suffers from AIDS, said he had returned to Lewiston only two years ago, after a twenty-three-year absence, because of the illness. "The rent was cheap and I could afford it," he said.

James Kales, a graduate of the Kennedy School of Government, lives in Brighton, Massachusetts.