While visiting family and friends in Maine recently, I noticed that the Christian Civic League is once again launching a referendum, this time to overturn the state’s new gay rights law. I am disappointed but not surprised. For more than a quarter century, the league has fought this heated battle.

The time has come to call it a day and let this law stand. The time has come for the league to move on. Over all these years, the same arguments have been mustered on both sides. Neither will concede the truth: A state statute protecting homosexuals from discrimination is neither the blessing nor the bane the activists claim it is. Very few would seriously insist that any person should lose his job simply because of his sexual orientation. No Christian should make such a case, vindictive as it is. Even fewer can point to any demonstrable pattern of discrimination against gay people in Maine, one of the nation’s most liberal and socially tolerant states.

This new law is not needed to accomplish what it claims to. Neither will this new law usher in the destruction of traditional family life, or the wide-scale sexual exploitation of children. Given the fear and loathing shown on each side of this emotional divide, at least among those doing the fighting, it’s to be expected that the polemics will far outpace the legal and cultural realities. The fact remains, a gay rights law in Maine won’t change much, if anything. Neither would its repeal.

The civic league fights not only a losing cause, but a vacuous one. This is a proverbial tempest in a teapot, calculated more to raise money and energize volunteers than to significantly clarify public policy.

During the 1980s and ’90s, the league began to move away from its prohibitionist stance on liquor, not because it suddenly favored booze, but because other issues were more pressing and the league needed to address those. So this century-old organization broadened its horizons and its agenda in Augusta. It spoke out on such things as criminal justice, education, poverty, welfare reform, children, tax justice and the environment. All of these are clear moral concerns that impact directly the lives of all our citizens in very important ways.

The league gained credibility by building at least functional alliances with a wide array of interest groups and by occasionally surprising “both friend and foe alike.” Then, throughout the late 1990s and into an exciting and unpredictable century, the league grew ever more strident and contentious in its strategies and its rhetoric. Its focus narrowed dramatically. Gone was the broad agenda of moral concerns and in its place an almost compulsive preoccupation with homosexuality (“sodomy” became the name of choice for the league). This culminated in the humiliating exposure of the league’s plan to “out” government officials. That should have sent an urgent message to thoughtful Christians in Maine that it was time for fundamental change.

Interestingly, national conservative groups and leaders such as the National Association of Evangelicals and Gary Bauer are broadening their own agendas and working with liberal groups on such transcending moral concerns as religious persecution, turmoil in the Sudan, prison rape in the United States, global warming and AIDS in Africa. This doesn’t mean they don’t speak out on abortion and homosexuality, but they balance their resources and time building coalitions for moral betterment on other more encompassing issues. That’s a positive and helpful approach that enhances credibility and effectiveness.

The league, which needs to restructure itself with brand new leadership, would be wise (and quite Christian) to follow this uplifting example. In the meanwhile, one may only hope that the ensuing debate will be a thoughtful and respectful discussion of this emotional and divisive topic. Not likely, but one may always hope.

Jack Wyman, of Highland Village, Texas, served as the Christian Civic League’s executive director from 1984-1994.