Who Needs to Know Gay People When You Can Rely on the Religious Right?

The San Francisco Chronicle has a telling quote about the influence that national Religious Right groups are having on the battle over marriage equality on the ground in Maine:

In Orrington, population 3,526, Ken Graves worked as a lumberjack for nine years after he started Calvary Chapel near Bangor. Twenty-five years later, the 47-year-old still sports a woodsman's thick arms and tough hands as he towers over an evangelical congregation of 1,500, one of Maine's largest.

Last week, Graves stood on the bank of the nearby Penobscot River clad in a red flannel shirt, where he and a videographer filmed a 30-second ad in favor of Question 1. He'll pay "a few thousand dollars" to air it locally.

"What got me is how the homosexual community being portrayed in this campaign is a gross misrepresentation of how it really is," Graves said. "You see these commercials of two happy moms, or two happy dads and happy siblings - when in fact they are not happy families. They are depressed."

He acknowledged that he doesn't know any gay families, saying he relies on the Family Research Council, a conservative think tank that finds homosexuality "harmful to the persons who engage in it and to society at large," and Focus on the Family, a group that helps people "overcome" gay attractions.

Update: Here is the commercial Graves' shot, via Good As You: