“As Maine goes, so goes Vermont.” Was the gleeful taunt of Democrats after those were the only two states to vote against Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936.

Now the question is: as Vermont went (and New Hampshire, too, this time), will so go Maine?

Vermont went first in April, becoming the first state to legalize same-sex marriage by legislation unaffected by court order. New Hampshire and Maine followed weeks later, but Maine is one of those states that empower the general public to overturn legislation by referendum.

A vote to overturn this law is on the ballot ten days from now. It’s Question 1, and it’s close. The last poll, by Public Policy Polling (PPP) of Raleigh, N.C., released Wednesday morning, showed 48 percent of Maine voters in favor of overturning the law, 48 percent opposed.

In one way, it was close in Vermont, too, with just enough members of the House voting to override Gov. Jim Douglas’s veto. But just enough was 100 out of 150 House members, after an easy override vote in the Senate. Just judging by the Legislative margin, Vermont’s approved of gay marriage wasn’t close at all.

But Maine is not Vermont, and vice versa. For starters, Vermont’s constitution doesn’t bother with referendums, or referenda, as the fancy folks say. During the marriage debate – as during the civil unions dispute of 2000 – some opponents argued that “the people” should have the power to overturn the new laws, or at least to register their views in an advisory, officially non-binding, vote.

What’s happening in Maine right now shows why that may be a bad idea.

Not that the referendum campaign has torn Maine apart. At least viewed from afar (really, reporters should go on site for stories about political campaigns, but in this case a trip proved impractical), the campaign seems to be taking place with at least a minimal amount of civility, and a local onlooker agrees. Intense it may be, but, in the words of Portland Press-Herald columnist Bill Nemitz, it “hasn’t turned all that nasty.”

Still, there are reasons the Founding Fathers set up a system of representative, rather than direct, democracy. It wasn’t just that government by plebiscite could lead, in James Madison’s words, to a “tyranny of the majority.” It was also that it provided an incentive for political combatants to accentuate the visceral – if not the primitive – and downplay the rational and the civil.

Some of which is happening in Maine, in part because the folks there may in fact have been influenced by what happened here.

One reason this year’s marriage debate aroused less passion than Civil Unions did in 2000 was that, for most Vermonters, the impact of Civil Unions was…well, it wasn’t.

A phenomenon (or absence of phenomenon) most notably reported not by a gay activist, but by Tom Torti, executive director of the Lake Champlain Regional Chamber of Commerce, who noted that after Civil Unions took effect, “the sun rose, people went off to work, businesses continued to locate here, tourism continued to flourish and…the doomsday scenarios that were pronounced failed to materialize.”

Hence the political pickle in which gay marriage opponents find themselves. They can count on a hard core of supporters who simply believe, for religious or other reasons, that homosexuality is wrong, or at least that it should not be endorsed by society. But that’s probably not a majority in any state in New England or elsewhere in the Northeast. To win, then, the opponents (in Maine, that means the proponents of a “yes” vote in the referendum) have to convince middle-of-the-road voters that legalizing same sex marriage won’t just legalize same sex marriage, but will bring about other, undesirable, consequences.

They tried that in Vermont, arguing, for instance, that clergymen might face “hate speech charges” if they read certain parts of the Bible in church, or that society would “lose all legal rational for limiting the size of families.”

None of that worked because none of it was true, and legislators, who had both the time and the ability to sift through the facts, could figure out it wasn’t true.

Voters are not legislators. They have jobs to go to, kids to raise, bills to pay. Nor are they trained to parse the fine print of legislation. So they can be easier to persuade, convince, or worry.

As the Maine campaign heads for its finish, gay marriage opponents are increasingly concentrating on their argument that the law will be “pushed onto Maine students” because the schools will “teach homosexual marriage.”

The law passed by the Legislature says nothing about schools or curriculum.

But in several states, with or without legal same sex marriage, schools are increasingly treating homosexuality as “part of the social norm,” as one anti-gay marriage writer put it, and Scott Fish, the spokesman for Stand for Marriage, Maine, said legalizing gay marriage would only hasten that trend.

Conceding that “homosexual marriage is being discussed in Maine schools to some degree already, usually in family life education courses,” Fish said that “common sense says that if it is legalized the discussion will broaden.”

Furthermore, he said parents can now make sure their children “opt out” of these classes, an option they might not have if gay marriage became legal. But several prominent lawyers, including two former Maine attorneys general, issued a memorandum insisting that legalizing gay marriage would have no effect on the curriculum, or on parental “opt out” rights.

Even if they’re right, the school allegations could be politically helpful to proponents of the referendum. Even if parents aren’t sure that the “Yes on Question 1” side is right on the facts, they might vote ‘yes’ if they’re not entirely convinced to the contrary.

As with all close elections, this one might depend on turnout, and here the pro- gay marriage “vote no” faction may have the advantage. It has more money, and at least as much enthusiasm. It also has the support of what might be considered the state’s establishment – most office-holders, educators, business executives, newspapers.

Then again, that’s not always an advantage.

The following is not – repeat not – from a Monty Python skit satirizing a priggish university don:

“When individual behavior conflicts with the values of the University, the individual must choose whether to adapt his or her behavior to meet the needs of the community or to leave the University. This decision, among others, assists each person to determine who he or she is with respect to the rest of society.”

On the contrary, it is the statement of an actual university official, or, considering that it reads as if written by committee, a cluster of actual university officials (we don’t call them ‘dons’ on this side of the pond) of the actual University of Vermont.

There is no indication that satire was his, her, or their intent.

Now let’s be fair to the staff of the Center for Student Ethics and Standards, author of the italicized paragraph above. What it is doing here is entirely justified. The paragraph is part of a disciplinary proceeding – a punishment, if you will – and it is directed at students who violated University rules.

Punishment, therefore, would seem to be in order.

Nor is this punishment all that severe. The plan, at least, is neither to suspend nor expel. All the miscreant students have to do is….well, eat crow.

Last April, the students in question, to protest university plans to raise tuition and cut faculty positions, walked into the campus building that houses the president’s office, and refused to leave after business hours and despite being ordered to disperse.

They occupied the corridor.

This exercise in civil disobedience didn’t do much good. The 32 protesters were a tiny fraction of the roughly 9,500 members of the student body, most of whom went about their business. The budget cuts at issue were imposed, slightly reduced thanks to federal money, not student complaints

But neither did the protesters do any harm. They hurt no person and damaged no property, unless one counts spilling a few crumbs of the pizzas smuggled in by sympathetic professors.

Still, they were punished. The students having violated not merely university rules, but the laws of the state of Vermont, said state charged them with trespassing, to which they (sort of) pled guilty and were sentenced to community service. Said service having been completed (this being a piece about academia, the ablative absolute is appropriate), their records are now clean.

In other words, as the state’s attorney clearly thought, it was no big deal. Better yet, for months, this not-so-big deal has been O-V-E-R over, which is, one would think, just what UVM’s bigwigs would want.

Not the folks at the Center for Student Ethics and Standards. They decided that community service was insufficient. The students may have been punished, but they would have to be re-punished.

Why? Well, a message to the University’s Communications Office seeking an answer to that question having gone unanswered, we will have to resort to conjecture based on a careful reading of the Center for (Yakkety-Yak)’s statement on the matter.

Which reads, in part, “you will note that your acceptance of the charges will result in a simple sanction that asks you to create a reflective response that attempts to prompt your thoughts specific to the incident. Once that response is submitted by the deadline noted, the matter will be considered resolved…”

This “reflective response” is to be a 1,000-word essay in which the student must “engage…in purposeful thought about what it means to be a member of the University of Vermont community. While it is intended to be a reflective assignment, and your completed work will not be evaluated on its content…be advised that your paper may not serve to merely justify your own actions or evaluate the actions of others”

(Memo to Center for Yakkety-Yak: You should really hire someone who can write a simple, declarative, English sentence).

Failure to complete the assignment , “will result in a $100.00 non-compliance fee, the cancellation of all pre-registered classes, a hold on… registration until these sanctions are completed, and/or further disciplinary action from the University.”

Now remember, we are still in the realm of conjecture, but here is what appears to have happened: Some folks at the Center for (whatever) sat around one day and said, “let’s devise a punishment which will humiliate these students to the utmost of our ability, and make it clear that we are grinding their noses in the dirt because we have the power to do so and they have no recourse whatsoever.

“Better yet, let’s express ourselves in the most pompous, priggish, pedantic language we can muster, just to prove that we are university bureaucrats.”

All of which might have been a touch less obnoxious if the boys at Ethics and Standards were known around campus as consistent executors of disciplinary action. They are not. Students who are part of the enforcement apparatus tell tales of nonfeasance even after they write up violations for drug and alcohol offenses. Present and former athletes report that –as in the old days well-connected Chicagoans took their traffic tickets not to city court but to the precinct committeeman who would “take care of it – so do members of certain teams take their write-ups to their coaches, who “take care of it.”

But some good may yet come of this. If, that is, these students possess both grit and wit. Grit they must have, or they would not have occupied the corridor. Wit is more doubtful. Student protesters are oft afflicted with earnestness, wit’s rival.

But (the rest of this is addressed to those 32 students), a few of you ought to be able to create an essay which, while meeting the terms of your penalty, also exposes those who set those terms as the priggish, pompous, self-righteous twits they are.

If so, send a copy to this web site. The best (assuming any are good enough) will be reprinted here (yeah, yeah; “printed” isn’t exactly the right word). It could be the beginning of a writing career.

It was cold last week, wasn’t it? And it’s gonna be a cold winter.

How do we know?

Well, we don’t know, in the sense of being certain beyond a scintilla of doubt. But we do have some pretty good info telling us it might be a good idea to make sure we have enough long-johns and sweaters for the coming months.

And no, this info does not come from the Farmers Almanac, which claims to be “known for its traditionally 80 percent accurate forecasts,” but does not reveal by whom it is so known.

Kind of fun, the Farmer’s Almanac, but even if it no longer uses the “pig spleen method” or the “ol’ goose bone method” of weather forecasting, its reliance on “a secret formula that was devised by (founder) Robert B. Thomas” in 1872 does not inspire confidence in its results, especially when its proprietors sum up their approach by proclaiming that they “believe that nothing in the universe happens haphazardly.”

Oh, sure it does.

Instead of secret formulas, this projection that a cold winter lies ahead comes from scientists both public and private, who project colder than usual weather for the entire Northeast, and who, being scientists, acknowledge a certain margin of error in their projections.

As AccuWeather.com’s Chief Meteorologist and Expert Long Range Forecaster (yes, all those capital letters are AccuWeather’s idea) Joe Bastardi, put it, this winter’s likely “fading El Niño results in the stormiest and coldest pattern in recent years.”

But don’t panic. First of all, the National Weather Service agrees about the cold, but not the storms. And even Bastardi thinks that most of those storms will be south of Boston, and therefore safely south of Vermont. Boston and northward, he said, should see “normal snowfall with temperatures slightly below normal this winter.”

That possible “fading El Nino” will make it colder because the stronger and longer-lasting the El Nino (“A change in the surface water temperature in the Pacific Ocean that produces a warm current”), the warmer it is all over the United States, even this far from the Pacific.

This far, though, the meteorological impact will be small, hence the projection of temperatures “slightly below normal.” No one is predicting a deep freeze.

The economic and political impacts are harder to predict. If winter precipitation is normal, the snow-plowing budgets should follow suit. On the other hand, colder weather is likely to prompt Vermonters to spend more money and/or split more logs to heat their homes. (Of course, the more logs one splits, the less fuel one needs, the act of splitting itself providing ample warmth).

The political prediction should be more qualified than the long-range weather forecast, but a cold winter is likely to energize the global warming denier crowd, even though a cold winter provides exactly zero evidence to refute the scientific consensus that human activity is warming the earth.

Alas, evidence or lack thereof seems no hindrance to the climate change deniers, who are inspired by impulses from within, not data from without. Consider the blogger calling himself “NORTHERNVT” who complained in Sunday’s Burlington Free Press that “global warming is a load of crappp,” his “evidence’ being that it was chilly out. This is not an argument based on evidence; it is a blurt based on resentment, specifically, in this case, of Al Gore and his movie An Inconvenient Truth.

Not that Gore et al don’t sometimes overstate their case. In the movie (reportedly; the News Guy did not see it) Gore makes much of the melting of the “Snows of Kilimanjaro,” famous because Ernest Hemingway made those words the title of one of his brilliant short stories.

The snow and ice on the mountain are melting, but not, according to some scientists, because of global warming. Significantly, though, these very scientists think the ice atop many other African mountains is melting because of global warming.

Aside from the occasional bleat, global warming denial has been an insignificant force in Vermont, where no major elected official seems to deny the overwhelming evidence of anthropogenic (the fancy term for “human-caused”) warming. The only deniers hereabouts are a commentator or two whom few take seriously to begin with.

But a bit of a counter-attack — on the face of it a most ineffectual counter-attack — is coming nationally, so if this winter is colder than usual, one might expect a little more noise from the local deniers.

The counter-attack comes in an about-to-be-published book by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, a sequel to their much praised best-seller, Freakonomics. The sequel is Superfreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Purchase Life Insurance (Harperluxe), which is a funny title, but the book seems to say (according to several discussions on line) that the earth has actually been getting cooler “over the past several years.”

Uhhh, no. The last two months were the second hottest August and Septembers on record. This year is likely to be the fifth hottest year on record, meaning that all ten hottest years will have occurred in the past 15 years.

There are more than enough other outrageous errors in the climate change chapter to prevent any reasonable person from taking it seriously.

Which is not to say that reasonable people shouldn’t keep an open mind. Like all other scientific conclusions, the anthropogenic global warming consensus is tentative. The first time a dissenter puts his or her doubts into scientific form, submits the product to the climatologists (peer review), and the climatologists can’t immediately dismiss it, then the rest of us will have to go back to square one.

So far, no such paper has been submitted.