Maine State Rep. Ryan Fecteau, 28, has been unanimously nominated to become Maine’s next Speaker of the House. In December, after the entire incoming House confirms the nomination — as they’re expected to do given their Democratic majority — Fecteau will become both the youngest and first openly gay speaker in the state.
On election day earlier this month, his constituents sent him back to the House for his fourth consecutive term. He represents Maine’s 11th District, a region comprising part of his native hometown of Biddeford.
When first elected to the Maine legislature in 2014, he was the youngest openly gay state rep ever elected in the US.
“We have a generation of Americans who are becoming more politically engaged than ever before,” Fecteau told the Portland Press Herald. “There’s a lot happening in our country and our world that has commanded the attention of young people to get involved and to have their voices be heard, while I didn’t necessarily expect for myself to be this person, in this position, I can say I’m not surprised that now’s the time for someone young to serve as a presiding officer in a (legislative) chamber in this country,” he said.
Reports the Press Herald:
[Fecteau] said his upbringing was much like that of many Mainers in working-class families, scratching to make a living, with few resources and limited educations.
He said his focus as speaker of the House will continue to be on improving the lives of those families.
“Obviously we are living in the midst of a pandemic that is causing tremendous harm to our communities, it has changed all of our lives in many, many ways, and first and foremost I’m concerned about families being able to make a living, put food on the table, to pay their mortgage, their car payments,” Fecteau said.
During his first six years in the Legislature he’s focused on affordable housing and health care issues, equal rights and on making so-called “conversion therapy” illegal in Maine. The practice is deployed by some religious counselors and is aimed at changing a minor’s sexual orientation. His first effort to ban the practice in 2018 ended in defeat, after then-Gov. Paul LePage, a Republican, vetoed a bill banning the practice, and minority House Republicans voted with LePage to sustain the veto.
The same year Republican governors in other states, including New Hampshire and New Jersey, signed similar bills into law banning the practice. But in 2019 Fecteau pushed ahead with the legislation again, the measure was easily passed and signed into law by Democratic Gov. Janet Mills making Maine the 17th state to ban the practice.
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