AUGUSTA, Maine, Jan. 15 (UPI) -- Maine Gov. Paul LePage said the NAACP could "kiss my butt" when he was asked why he was not attending any events for Martin Luther King Day.
The governor's remark -- "Tell 'em to kiss my butt" -- triggered angry comments from other groups, the Portland Press Herald reported Friday.
"The governor's comments are creating, have the potential to create, a real racial dilemma for all Mainers," said Ralph Carmona, a spokesman for the United League of Latin American Citizens. "It is astonishing and troubling he would use this kind of rhetoric."
During the campaign, LePage, who was inaugurated this month, was seen in a video telling an audience at a Republican forum he would tell President Barack Obama to "go to hell."
LePage, a Republican who had Tea Party backing, told a reporter after a meeting in Sanford the NAACP is a "special interest."
"They are a special interest," he said. "End of story. And I'm not going to be held hostage by special interests. And if they want, they can look at my family picture. My son happens to be black, so they can do whatever they'd like about it."
"I don't care who he's got in his family," Rachel Talbot Ross, the group's state director and president of the Portland branch, told the Press Herald. "And he's saying we're playing the race card? The makeup of his family isn't the issue and it never was the issue."
