OPINION:
It’s dumbfounding why female Democratic politicians consistently come down on the side of gender-confused faux females when they draw pushback for interloping into real girls’ and women’s athletics and invading their restrooms and locker rooms.
When actual female athletes are cheated out of medals, trophies and scholarships designated for them and when they object to having to share private spaces with so-called transgender girls and women — i.e., biological males — they are told by liberal Democratic women to, in effect, “Suck it up, Buttercup.”
In siding with the estimated .003 of 1% of the population who “identify” as trans over the 51% of the population who are real girls and women, liberal female Democratic politicians seem to be afflicted with some perverse form of psychosexual Stockholm Syndrome.
In the case of Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, 51, currently seeking the Democratic nomination for governor, it might be because she has no children and, as such, has “no skin in the game.”
Perhaps if she had a daughter who had lost out on an athletic scholarship or been forced to undress in a school locker room alongside a “girl” with male biology, Ms. Bellows might not be so cavalier in using her authority to invalidate a petition drive aiming to put the issue to a vote in the Pine Tree State in November.
The parents group behind the initiative, Protect Girls’ Sports in Maine, is asking a state court to overturn Ms. Bellows’ ruling on Tuesday that more than 12,000 of the signatures on the petition for the referendum were invalid, causing it to come up a few hundred short of the 67,682 signatures needed to send it to voters.
The referendum question would ask Maine voters whether they want to require public schools to restrict access to sports and restrooms based on the sex indicated on a student’s birth certificate.
Ben Midgley, a former gym chain executive running for the Republican nomination for governor in the June 9 primary, slammed her ruling. “Shenna Bellows has SILENCED tens of thousands of Mainers by invalidating the referendum question,” he wrote on social media. “This is a common sense, fairness, and safety issue. Biological men don’t belong in women’s sports.”
He’s exactly right.
If the court should overrule Ms. Bellows and order the plebiscite to proceed, don’t be surprised if the far-left secretary of state then tries to rewrite the submitted wording of the initiative on the ballot to make it something other than what the petitioners intend — or to confuse voters as to what a “yes” or “no” vote means.
We wouldn’t be surprised because Ms. Bellows, a former executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine, is a radical political operative with a previous attempt at election-rigging.
In December 2023, in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, she decreed that once-and-future President Trump would be kept off the Maine GOP primary ballot owing to what she deemed to be illegitimate conduct by him in connection with the January 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol attack.
After Mr. Trump challenged Ms. Bellows’ decision, she appealed adverse rulings by state courts all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled decisively — 9-to-0 — in his favor on March 4, 2024.
“Once again, Shenna Bellows abuses her office to sway elections,” state Sen. Matt Harrington, Sanford Republican, wrote on Facebook. “She pretends to be a defender of democracy, but in practice, she uses her office as a dictatorship.”
If the court should concur with Ms. Bellows that the petitioners submitted an insufficient number of valid signatures such that the question can’t be placed on the November ballot, proponents of protecting girls’ sports in Maine have ready recourse, however.
Maine’s governorship and both houses of the state legislature will be on the ballot in November. Democrats currently hold a trifecta, but only by slim margins in both the House and Senate. This is an 85%-to-15% issue, and Republican candidates across the state should make it the defining issue of the campaign.
If Maine Republicans then take back all three, they can and should enact those protections for girls’ sports into state law directly.
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