Maine Considers Becoming “Sanctuary State” for Kids Seeking Gender Transitions

Having already stripped their state’s parents of many of their rights in furtherance of the transgender agenda, Maine lawmakers are now considering legislation that would make the Pine Tree State a haven for kids who want to change their gender — and the adults who enable them to do so.

The worst of the transgender madness, it seems, has leapt from the Left Coast to the East Coast. Alvin Lui, president of Courage Is a Habit, a group that combats the LGBT agenda, told the Daily Caller’s Mary Rooke that “Maine is following the ‘California blueprint’ by passing bills that attack parental rights in small increments, making it hard for parents to fight back before it is too late.”

“Over the last several years,” reported Rooke, “the Maine legislature has lowered the requirement for parental consent to perform medical treatment for children [and] given the authority to school counselors and social workers to transition children without parents’ knowledge.”

Now, the Democrat-dominated body is considering a bill, LD1735, that would (a) make Maine a “sanctuary state” for minors from other states seeking gender transitions and (b) declare parents’ refusal to accede to their kids’ requests for “gender-affirming care” grounds for the state to take custody of them.

Rooke noted that “proponents say the law would simply protect transgender youth from ‘bigoted’ restrictions on sex changes in red states” — as if that is any business of the state of Maine to begin with.

In fact, the bill’s text is far-reaching, effectively preventing parents from having any say in their children’s gender-related decisions and nullifying other states’ laws restricting sex-change treatments for minors.

Under the proposed law, an adult could take a child to Maine to obtain puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or sex-change surgery, and the child’s parents would have no recourse to prevent such treatments or to retrieve their child, even if they live in a state with laws restricting such treatments for minors.

For one thing, the bill prohibits law enforcement from arresting or extraditing individuals based on other states’ laws against “gender-affirming health care” for minors. Maine State Representative Katrina Smith, a Republican, told Rooke that, under LD1735, “law enforcement cannot enforce any out-of-state order that gets sent to them. I talked to sheriffs about it. They were horrified. They do not want to deal with this at all.”

For another, the legislation also forbids Maine courts from deferring to minors’ home-state courts in disputes over gender transitions. “The way this law is written is so blatantly unconstitutional on its face that it is offensive to me as an attorney that a duly elected legislator would even suggest something like this,” New York-licensed family attorney Alexander Lonstein told Rooke. “This undermines the fundamental bedrock principle of the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the Constitution.”

Lonstein called LD1735 “political lawfare” that is “disgusting” and “insanity.” “States,” he maintained, “do not have the extra-judicial authority to effectively grant sovereignty over non-residents because of their stance on an issue that is hotly debated.”

“LD 1735 is a Transgender Trafficking Bill which would permit the state of Maine to receive minors from other states seeking transgender treatments, such as breast binding, penis tucking, irreversible puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or mutilation surgeries,” contends Courage Is a Habit. “The bill allows the state to take these minors from their parents and make them wards of the state, with state-funded programs covering the cost of their treatment.”

Indeed, LD1735 grants the state “temporary emergency jurisdiction” over any child “present in this state” if “the child has been unable to obtain gender-affirming health care or gender-affirming mental health care.” A child whose parents object to his desired gender treatment, even if he is not a legal resident of Maine, can thus be taken from his parents and put into Maine’s foster-care system, which is not a safe place to be.

“Our state foster system is in complete shambles,” Smith told Rooke. “It’s not like foster care would be a good place for these children to go. A shocking number of children have died in state custody.”

That’s not hyperbole. Last month, a nonprofit seeking to improve Maine’s child-welfare system released a report finding that a record 32 children died in state custody in 2021, and 48 more had followed in the succeeding two years. This is the system into which the supposedly compassionate lawmakers of Augusta want to dump gender-confused kids from across the country?

LD1735 tries to portray itself as merely protecting parental prerogatives to seek “gender-affirming care” for their children. “This bill,” explains the summary, “prohibits the enforcement of an order based on another state’s law authorizing a child to be removed from the child’s parent or guardian based on that parent or guardian allowing the child to receive gender-affirming health care or gender-affirming mental health care.”

However, Rooke wrote, the experts she interviewed “all agree that the ambiguous language in LD1735 enables a situation where a 12-year-old-girl can be picked up from her home in a state like Florida by a third party, driven across several states to Maine and presented to the Maine court system without parental approval.”

The Maine Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote Thursday on whether to pass the bill out of committee for a vote of the full Senate, which is 68-percent Democrat. Will enough senators have the courage to put a stop to this unconscionable, unconstitutional legislation?