A pair of Republican lawmakers in Maine were ruled out of order on Thursday after one of them tried to suggest that a horrific mass shooting last October was God’s retribution for a state bill which expanded abortion access, and the other heartily agreed.
During a debate Wednesday night over a new bill which would extend the right to gender-affirming care to people from out of state, Rep. Michael Lemelin voiced his trepidation by making a wildly offensive connection between the two discrete incidents.
“When (L.D.) 1619 passed and went into law on Oct. 25, you told God life doesn’t matter,” he said, referring to the abortion bill.
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“Keep in mind that the law came into effect on Oct. 25. God heard you and the horrible events on Oct. 25 happened,” he said, referring to last year’s horrific mass shootings in Lewiston, which claimed the lives of 19 people, including the perpetrator.
Rep. Shelley Rudnicki backed up Lemelin’s argument that another piece of legislature concerned with expanding healthcare would only bring about more violence and bloodshed.
“I just want to stand and say that I agree with Rep. Lemelin and everything he said,” she said.
On Thursday, the Speaker of Maine’s House of Representatives Rachel Talbot-Ross, a Democrat, signed two letters to Lemelin and Rudnicki, in which she ruled them both out of order, and called for a vote to censure the errant lawmakers.
In the letters, Ross called their comments “extremely offensive and intentionally harmful to the victims and the families of the Lewiston tragedy, the House of Representatives, and the People of Maine.”
“The behavior and your agreement with this language violated the order of decorum of the House Chamber. Your actions are deserving of the most serious consequences this body can deliver,” Ross wrote.
The House Democratic office called the comments “as asinine as they are reprehensible.”
The bill lawmakers were debating to expand gender-affirming care passed in the state legislature by a vote of 80 to 70.
