True story: Several years ago, anti-gay activist Michael Heath posted an item on his blog saying that if he were ever elected governor, he’d hire me as his press secretary.

That’s when I realized Michael Heath is an idiot.

Apparently, Heath thought I’d make a good spokesman for his hateful agenda because I’m blunt, and TV makes me look fat. Overweight obnoxious guys are always the best salespeople for bigotry.

Unfortunately for my employment prospects in a Heath administration, I wouldn’t fit in at all. Heath is a fundamentalist Christian bent on turning Maine into a theocracy. I’m a beer-swilling libertarian committed to keeping church and state as separate as Lamar Odom and Khloe Kardashian.

After a few years of relative silence, Heath, once the head of the Christian Civic League of Maine, resurfaced this spring, announcing he was launching a referendum campaign to repeal the state’s law guaranteeing basic civil rights to people regardless of sexual orientation. At a news conference earlier this month, he claimed he’ll have 500 volunteers at the polls in November to gather at least 62,000 signatures to force a vote on the issue in 2017. And that’s just the beginning of his crusade.

Heath doesn’t just want to force “a behavior that belongs in the closet back into the closet.” He wants to recast Maine’s governmental structure into an Orwellian state of “ordered liberty.” To that end, he wouldn’t limit his efforts to ending legal protections for gays, lesbians and transgendered people. He’d make homosexual acts illegal – as in jail sentences for sodomy.

Heath also recognizes that restoring society to his vision of morality will require more than making it once again acceptable to refer to people as “queers” and “fags.” In an April op-ed announcing his return to the political battlefield, he promised “to oppose such concepts as sexual liberation, gay marriage, polyamory, pansexuality and the ‘hook up culture.’”

Hey wait, some of that stuff is practiced by heterosexuals.

That’s right, straight people, Heath is coming after you, too. Not only does he believe all sex outside marriage is wrong, he’d also outlaw divorce. Lamar and Khloe would once again be as bound together in misery as church and state.

Abortion? Not for any reason. Legalize marijuana? No way. Drinking? Heath favors reinstituting the prohibition of alcohol. And with sex and drugs banned, how long could it be before he came after rock and roll?

Here’s the really weird part: In spite of favoring every sort of government intrusion into the lives of private citizens, Heath still believes he’s a traditional conservative. In 2013, when Gov. Paul LePage sparked outrage by describing then-state Sen. Troy Jackson as being “the first one to give it to the people without providing Vaseline,” Heath and fellow homophobe Paul Madore were virtually the only public figures to jump to the guv’s defense.

“Gov. Paul LePage was in good company using an allusion to sodomy to condemn expensive big-government solutions to the challenges confronting Maine people,” Heath announced at a news conference. “Those condemned by the governor’s remark are the very same leaders who are promoting sodomy in our schools. This fact makes his allusion even more powerful. He used figurative language to reveal a profound truth about our current situation. Maine is being sodomized by the left, especially our impressionable and innocent children.”

If Heath had his way, “big-government solutions” would be replaced by even bigger government mandates, under which the state would control our sex lives and our recreational activities, while strictly censoring school curriculums to protect our youth from any deviance from the Heathian norm.

Mainers passed a law granting civil rights to LGBT citizens in a 2005 referendum. In 2012, we voted to legalize same-sex marriage. Since then, there’s been no discernible decline in public morality. The state had the second lowest crime rate in the nation in 2015. Teen pregnancy has declined precipitously in the last decade. Our high divorce rate has dropped slightly. And according to U.S. News & World Report, Maine high schools ranked seventh in the nation last year in student achievement.

As the official spokesman for imaginary Gov. Heath, I’d have to say he’s full of crap.

This press conference is over. Additional questions can be emailed to aldiamon@hernihill.net.