The Rachel Maddow Show interviews Jesse Connolly '01, campaign manager for Maine's gay marriage referendum
The day after voters overturned Maine’s gay-marriage law, Portland Press Herald columnist Bill Nemitz writes a poignant profile of Jesse Connolly ’01, who led the campaign to keep the law and whose late father, in the ’70s, began the political fight to protect homosexuals under Maine law. Jesse Connolly’s media appearances this fall included on one MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show, where she notes that the strategy to overturn Maine’s law is identical to the strategy used in California in 2008 to outlaw gay marriage there. “Have you benefited from that?” she asks Connolly, a politics major at Bates. He tells Maddow that “we’ve looked at the playbook of the other side. We think our ads put these guys back in their box. We’re not going to let anything go unchallenged. We push back very hard and we push back very quickly.” View video from The Rachel Maddow Show, Oct. 20, 2009. Connolly was often quoted in the media in October:
