The state senator from Farmington, Peter Mills, announced in August that he is running for Governor of Maine. Mills, who is term-limited out in 2012 as a Republican State Senator, is the most formidable of the twenty announced candidates for governor, since he is sure to have the backing of the liberal establishment.
Though nominally a Republican, Mills is on closer examination an arch-liberal. His support for homosexual marriage and abortion are diametrically opposed to traditional Republican values, not to mention the most basic principles of morality and ethics.
In 2007, Mills was one of only four cosponsors of a bill that would have expanded the availability of abortions to low income women, and would have provided $500 of tax payer money to each woman seeking an abortion.
In 2006, Mills was among a handful of Republicans who attended an annual gay rights fund raising dinner for the state's largest homosexual rights organization, Equality Maine.
In July, Peter's sister Janet, who is Maine's Attorney General, celebrated same sex marriage with Barney Frank at an event in Portland. At least one prominent supporter of gay marriage in the state is looking to Janet Mills to reverse the vote on gay marriage depending on the outcome of a Federal court case which seeks to reverse the vote on Proposition 8.
Peter encourages the perception that he has honest political differences with his sister, Janet, but he says it with a wink and a grin. Mainers might not tolerate being ruled by a brother and sister united in ideology and ambition.
An audio tape of an interview from May 2000 reveals several interesting insights into the state senator's thinking. During the interview, Mills, a Harvard-trained lawyer, makes some curious remarks about Margaret Chase Smith. Mills points out her lack of schooling, calling her "the least educated person in Congress" then proceeds to criticize her method of legislating. As an example of proper legislating, he then describes his own way of conducting business in the Maine State Senate.
At one point in the interview Mills says that Margaret Chase Smith looked old, like "a nursing home candidate." This gratuitously cruel remark was certainly a strange way to treat a Maine icon, a close political ally, and a benefactor of Mills's father. In fact, the interview states that Margaret Chase Smith gave the young Peter Mills a Congressional appointment to the Naval Academy. One is reminded of Barack Obama's joke about the Special Olympics, or the recent comment by a pro-gay marriage publisher in Maine that he is 'waiting for all the old people in Maine to die'.
In the interview, Mills also mentions Margaret Chase Smith's attack on Senator Joseph McCarthy, and the anti-McCarthy speech which propelled her to fame, without mentioning the fact that Smith was urged to make her famous 'Declaration of Conscience' by the socialist Walter Lippmann. Curiously, in the audio tape, Peter Mills states that his family was so interested in the McCarthy hearings, that Peter was allowed to skip school and stay home to watch the hearings on TV.
That is the left-wing milieu which shaped Mills's character, so it is not surprising that he endorses the ideas of abortion and homosexual marriage.
No gubernatorial candidate, Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, could be farther removed from Maine values. What Mills claims are conservative economic values, the idea of individualism and unadulterated self-interest, are pure classical liberalism. Such ideas are the opposite of the Christian idea that economics must be subordinate to the higher goals of society.
According to the interview, Mill's father was a U.S. Attorney who thought of his job as "an instrument for social change." Mills recalls with obvious delight how his father used his office to prosecute socially prominent members of Maine communities who were suspected of not paying enough Federal Income Tax.
The Mills family is now the most powerful family in Maine. If Peter Mills becomes governor, Maine will be faced with an unprecedented situation in which one sister of the governor, Janet Mills, will be the top law enforcement officer, while the other sister, Dora Anne Mills, shown at right, will be the top doctor in the state. Incredibly, Dora Anne Mills, though the sister of a Republican gubernatorial candidate, is a former member of the Democratic National Committee.
All three will hold left wing positions on feminism, abortion, and homosexual marriage, while Peter Mills continues the charade that he is actually 'a fiscal conservative.'
By the Staff of Christian Civic League of Maine
Maine Family Policy Council com
