ROCKPORT – Preaching to a liberal choir Wednesday night at Camden Hills Regional High School’s Strom Auditorium, syndicated columnist Molly Ivins heard plenty of “amens,” even though her anecdotes and observations were sprinkled with ribaldry more at home in a reporters’ bar.

Ivins’ speech – a benefit for the Maine Civil Liberties Union – drew a full house, selling more than 800 tickets.

The audience embraced Ivins from the start, and only warmed more to her as the barbs at fellow Texans such as President George W. Bush grew sharper and more frequent.

Speaking to reporters before the event, Ivins said 12 years ago she made the commitment to donate one speech a month in defense of the First Amendment. Her assistant recently joked, “We’ve done 28 so far this year.”

The talks often are in the basement of some civic building in a small town, she said, but have served as “one of the greatest sources of inspiration in my life,” talking to people on the front lines of the fight for civil liberties, people she called “the real heroes.”

The Constitution often is defended, she said, by ordinary people who say, “‘Well, that’s not right.’ And they stand up and fight.”

During her hourlong-plus talk, Ivins, with a masterful storyteller’s pace, inflection and color, leaned heavily on the political eccentricity of her home state.

She talked about the streak of five speakers of the state House of Representatives who had been indicted, broken only by one who was shot to death by his wife.

“She was not indicted,” Ivins deadpanned.

Then there was the Texas legislator who, facing sure failure in a re-election bid, paid his cousin to shoot him in the arm, allowing the politician to blame the local Satanic, communist cult.

And when the Ku Klux Klan planned a march in one city, she and others plotted a response, finally settling on lining up along the parade route to “moon” those in the white sheets.

“It was kind of like a ‘wave,'” Ivins said.

“You people need to work at having more fun,” she said several times, urging those who fight for the Constitution – freedom fighters, she called them – to find the joy in the work.

On a more serious note, Ivins lamented the pattern she sees in which fear provokes threats to Constitutional freedoms.

“We get so scared of some terrible menace,” she said, whether it be communism, drugs, crime or terrorism. “We get scared and we start to make ourselves less free.”

While acknowledging the horrible act that was the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, she said, “Ripping up the Constitution because of [it] is ill-advised.”

Civil liberties unions often earn unpopularity by suing to remove a Christmas decoration from a public place, Ivins said. But those efforts are important, she argued, quoting President James Madison, who said that separation of church and state ensured that the United States would not see its soils saturated by the blood of religious conflict such as those in Europe.

Ivins fielded a dozen questions from the audience, then ended as she began, trying to cheer up the liberal faithful.

“We’re the ones who really run this deal,” she told a woman who asked about how liberals should respond to the conservative Supreme Court. “Even with this degree of corruption … when we the people get stirred up enough, when we raise enough hell, we can back down any corporate interest.”