A sage once offered this definition of democracy: “Democracy is like a raft. It never sinks, but damn it, your feet are always in the water.” This cynical tidbit comes to mind if you sift through all of the proposed Maine legislative bills that wound up in the ONTP trash bag. (ONTP is an Augusta acronym that stands for Ought Not To Pass). The legislative committees, for example the Fish and Wildlife Legislative Committee, debate the proposed laws and then give their recommendations to the larger legislative body for a vote.

Most cringe-worthy of all are the legislative ideas that never got off the launch pad. Most of the bills that do pass simply make our lives more complicated and expensive, so, in your Thanksgiving Day prayer, be sure to say thanks for all of the silly, self-serving bills that did not become law.

Among them are:

 LD 242 — An act that would allow firearms hunters to wear pink instead of hunter orange.

 LD 257 — An act to allow a person to take a 20-minute break from monitoring ice-fishing traps.

 LD 608 — An act that would allow junior, senior and veteran hunters to shoot an antlerless deer anywhere on opening day.

 LD 1430 — An act to allow hunters whose religion prohibits wearing hunter orange clothing to instead wear red.

 LD 291 — An act to allow the hunting of small game animals with a slingshot.

 The temptation to muse and speculate about what triggered our esteemed lawmakers to sponsor these proposed state laws with a straight face is just too irresistible.

 A slingshot? Who needs a law or license? When I was a kid, we fashioned our own slingshots out of a piece of bike inner tube, an old shoe tongue and a crotched stick of apple wood. And we hunted, sans le license. Could a youngster build a slingshot today without  Googling some instructions? Would he or she want to? Would mom allow it?

As for LD 1430, which would have allowed us to shed our hunter orange hats and vests on religious grounds, anyone — including me — ridicules this at their peril. The legislator who sponsored this bill will no doubt take me to the woodshed, all the while explaining that this bill was born out of a legitimate, sincere concern for somebody’s religious beliefs, that there is no hidden agenda.

Although the law requires deer hunters to wear a hunter orange hat and vest, and the law has saved lives and drastically improved hunting safety, there is a school of serious deer hunters yet to be convinced that orange hunters aren’t more visible to a wise old buck. Most of them would prefer not to walk through the cedar bog looking like a neon sign to that bruiser buck in the shadows. If they wear their blaze orange when they are on the track, far from the eye of the law, they do so begrudgingly, though they won’t admit it publicly. If this law had ever passed there would have been a bunch of new deer hunters “getting religion.”

 As for LD 257, which would have allowed ice fishermen to leave their traps unattended for 20 minutes, that’s a no brainer. We’ve all been there. Some hapless ice fisherman left his traps, hit the woods for relief, and got nabbed by a Game Warden watching from shore.

 The author is editor of the Northwoods Sporting Journal. He isalso a Maine Guide, co-host of a weekly radio program “Maine Outdoors.” His e-mail address is paul@sportingjournal.com . He has two books “A Maine Deer Hunter’s Logbook” and his latest, “Backtrack.”