BY MATT WICKENHEISER

Maine Sunday Telegram

Bill Whitten finds himself looking at people he meets, wondering to himself how they voted on Question 1.

Michael Poulin is worried about what he believes is a resurgence of anti-Catholicism in the state.

Beverly Uhlenhake feels it's easier to have conversations about gay and lesbian-led families like her own -- but also thinks the myth of Maine as a "live and let live" state has been debunked.

Janice Couture sees a reaffirmation and strengthening of traditional marriage, a reinforcement of her beliefs.

Gay marriage has been debated for a year in Maine. The idea was first raised in November 2008. A gay marriage bill worked through the Legislature, was signed into law by the governor and was debated and ultimately repealed last week by the voters of Maine, 299,483 to 267,574, a margin of 31,909 votes with 99 percent of the precincts reporting.

For many people, nothing has changed. But for those who were engaged in the debate, Maine is a different place today than it was a year ago. People have left their churches, upset over the official stance on same-sex marriage. Others feel they've been painted as bigots for their beliefs.

Maine has changed.

How, and to what extent, depends on who you ask.

The Marine

Bill Whitten was born in Lincoln, lived in Brewer, then Cumberland and now calls Yarmouth home. He played football and baseball in school, went into the Marines, is a black belt martial arts instructor and had a "pretty macho" life until he and his wife had two daughters.

And his youngest daughter is gay.

Whitten has taken on a number of veteran-related causes in the area. He's the guy who erected the flag out on Fort Gorges in Casco Bay. He raised $150,000 to restore the USS Portland mast on Munjoy Hill. Those were important causes, but he realized what he should be doing when the gay marriage debate came up, said Whitten.

"My real calling was the principle of equality and what's right and wrong. When this whole gay marriage thing came up I said 'This just wasn't right,'" said Whitten. "It's wrong that these people don't have the same rights."

He testified during the public hearing on the bill, and was in a commercial urging Mainers to vote no on question one. Everyone he talked to told him they were voting no. Now, after the vote, he's angry, wonders who was telling him the truth, who voted yes. Lincoln, where he grew up, voted 70 percent to 30 percent to veto the bill. He saw pictures of veto supporters cheering, and he's depressed.

Someone told him he couldn't take the vote personally. He doesn't know how not to.

"This is my daughter, my family, that was told they were less," said Whitten. "This is just saying that what she is, is less than anyone else.

With each passing year, he likes the cold less and less. He's been considering a move to warmer climes, and the vote has moved up the timetable, said Whitten.

"I just don't want to be here, and this is a place I've lived for 60 years," said Whitten. "I've lived here all my life - this is the only time in my life I'm embarrassed to say I'm from Maine."

The foot soldier

Janice Couture worked on the veto campaign from the start, collecting signatures to put the question on the ballot, then making phone calls, going door-to-door - all the foot-soldier tasks important to any political effort.

The reason she worked so hard as a volunteer was simple for Couture. Changing the definition of marriage in Maine, said Couture, "would have created a wound that wouldn't have healed."

"If you take the backbone of society, the foundation, the structure - when you remove that, you remove what holds society together," said Couture, who grew up in Biddeford and lives in Falmouth.

The vote has had a very real impact on Couture, she said, and on Maine.

"It's reinforced what I believe, and it's reinforced what everyone else on the yes side believed," said Couture.

"I feel, if anything, the people that support marriage - traditional, monogamous marriage - their perceptions and attitudes are even stronger and as deep as they've always been. They do believe marriage to be something that shouldn't be touched."

And the vote -- the whole process, really -- was empowering. Couture found she lived in a state where the people have final say, after government's say.

"We still have this right, this ability to do this," she said. "People want to speak, they want their voices heard."

She's upset that people on the other side of the issue think opponents of same-sex marriage are bigots, full of hate. She believes they're hurt, disappointed in the vote.

"We have to move on -- and move on with dignity, with love, with grace and peace," said Couture.

Maine has changed

Maine changed on April 22 for Bev Uhlenhake.

That was the day she and her partner drove down to Augusta to testify at the public hearing on the same-sex marriage bill. Thousands of people packed the Augusta Civic Center. The hearing lasted over 10 hours. She testified, speaking in favor of the bill.

"Maine is a different place. We saw that it was a different place on the day that we were all in Augusta," said Uhlenhake. "That's the day that it was obvious to me that the state of Maine has changed."

The thousands of supporters who showed up weren't all gay, said Uhlenhake, a Bangor businesswoman. It was a crowd of people who supported families like her's -- she and her partner have an 18-month-old baby.

The whole process has made Maine a better place, said Uhlenhake.

"I think that the campaign made it OK to be gay in Maine," said Uhlenhake. "It was OK to talk about our stories, to talk about our children, to talk about our lives."

That's an evolving view, she added. Tuesday night, as the election results slowly turned and her side lost, the feeling was "horrible," she said.

"I think a lot of us woke up on Wednesday and realized we weren't as open as we thought we were - I think that realization was very painful," said Uhlenhake. "This is supposed to be the state of live and let live -- we found out that was not true."

The vote, she said, perpetuated the stereotype that Maine is not just rural, but "redneck rural," a "southern state geographically located in the north."

"The state of Maine's going to have to work on that perception," she said.

Role of the church

Father Robert Vaillencourt knows that some Catholics are angry with the church, but believes they are placing greater priority on its secular actions than on its spiritual mission.

They're missing the main point, he said, the primary reason the church exists - a connection to God, a way to worship God.

"I just feel that people, when they make their decision about going to church, have judged the church and no longer need the church because it didn't give them the answer they wanted," said Vaillencourt, director of the office of vocations for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland. "It's the worship of God, it's not what we make God out to be."

The diocese was a driving force behind the campaign to repeal the same-sex marriage law. That has caused some Catholics to leave the church, others to question or protest the actions, and a number of others to criticize it. There are roughly 200,000 Catholics in Maine though only about 30 percent are considered "active."

Michael Poulin, a Lewiston lawyer, said he's seen a strong sentiment against the Catholic church.

"The baring of the strong undercurrent of anti-Catholic feeling, that has troubled me," said Poulin.

A student of history, Poulin said it reminds him of the nativist movement of the turn of the last century, when groups like the Ku Klux Klan were strong in Maine and targeted Catholics.

"Whenever I see one of these comments that attacks the church or the bishop or a priest, from my perspective it not only detracts from, but eviscerates their position," said Poulin. "It makes me think of that history."

Outpouring of support

Stephen Ryan and James Bishop put roughly $12,000 of their own money to the fight against question one. The Bar Mills couple own and manage 51 apartments, and put that business on hold to work on the campaign.

Three years ago, Ryan noted, Maine didn't have laws barring discrimination for sexual orientation. Today the discussion is around gay marriage. And the vote only lost by 5.6 percentage points.

"I think Maine has changed enormously," said Ryan.

He continued, "We have been amazed at the huge outpouring of support from all the people we know - people we barely knew. Maine is a very different place because these people are enraged that we were not given the right to marry. They consider it an enormous affront."

The fact that the vote was so close makes him enormously optimistic, said Ryan. A 40-60 percent defeat would have crushed him, and other supporters, he said. But it was much closer, and he sees future attempts passing. There's a generational gap in the vote, conventional wisdom holds, with younger people supporting same-sex marriage and older people opposed. Every year, there's fewer of those older voters, he suggested.

"I think it was a pyrrhic victory that the yes people won," said Ryan. "They got as many people out to vote as they'll ever get."

"We didn't."