Sarx

I’ve said this for quite some time… give up tax exemption. The benefits you receive from the state require of you special obligations to the laws and powers of that state.

Two women want to hold a civil union - legal in NJ - on a boardwalk overlooking the Atlantic Ocean in Ocean Grove.

Seems the 1 square mile of Neptune Township, NJ, called Ocean Grove, is owned by a private association that claims to be religious. That association wishes to claim that, as private and religious property, they should be exempt from the state’s civil rights laws - including the otherwise public buildings on the boardwalk. In fact, they claim to be exempt even from the investigation for such violation.

BeliefNet reports that homes within the one square mile are also leased from the church - evidently the entire town was under archaic blue laws until the courts struck them down in 1980 as a church-state issue. It would seem this is also part of the same problem.

The wedding is to be conducted in a pavilion on the boardwalk. The pavilion is used by the religious organisation that owns Ocean Grove. The state wants to declare the pavilion “public accommodation” because it’s on a boardwalk but the church says it owns the boardwalk, too.

However… according to the NY Times, in 1985…

In an interview not far from the gazebo that enshrines Ocean Grove’s first artesian well (it was sunk in 1870), Mr. Truitt (then president of the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association of the United Methodist Church) explained that the Camp Meeting Association was not affiliated with the United Methodist Church. Over the years, he said, the program at the Great Auditorium had become public.

This was because they wanted money from the state, you see. There were Republicans in power there, in NJ.

…Irwin I. Kimmelman, then the state Attorney General, issued an opinion that the Camp Meeting Association was secular. He said, for example, that because the association had opened the auditorium to public, nondenominational events, such as commencement exercises for Neptune Township High School, it was eligible for state funds.

So far, this new eligibility has resulted in a $100,000 appropriation to clean up Wesley Lake, which separates Ocean Grove from Asbury Park (no work has begun yet), and a $250,000 grant toward replacement of the auditorium’s one-acre roof. All were obtained by Senator Pallone. (Wesley Lake is named for John Wesley, the English clergyman and evangelist, who founded Methodism.) The township, Mayor Molinaro said, has begun forming a beach commission so that, as a municipal agency, it can obtain Green Acres funds and state and Federal coastal restoration money.

You can’t have it both ways, however. Even in 1985, Neptune Township said if Ocean Grove wanted to be religious, they couldn’t get the state aid. If the benefits of the state are forbidden within your property then give up the benefits you receive from the state and start to pay taxes on that property as in a private estate or what California calls “Tenancy in Common”. If you want to be “A portion of land skirting the sea, consecrated to sacred uses and with a single eye to the Divine Glory” (as the charter says) then pay full price.

I’ve insisted for quite some time that religions have the right to their doctrines. And I’ve also said, for some time, a church should give up the benefits it receives from the state because those can be used against the church. In other words, pay full price for the property you hold so that, in effect (in this case) the Boardwalk in Ocean Grove becomes private property as in a country club.

I’d also ask that the Camp Meeting Association, if it wants to be religious, should be made to pay back any federal funds it has received as a result of being declared “secular” by the NJ Attorney General.