The Ocean Grove Dispute Goes National Thanks to the misnamed National Organization for Marriage the dispute over
use of the Boardwalk Pavilion for civil unions has gotten nationwide attention.
But neither “Ocean Grove” nor “civil unions” are mentioned,
and there is more misinformation than accurate supplied. The National Organization for Marriage (“NOM”) was started in 2007
by Maggie Gallagher, along with Princeton faculty member Robert P. George. The
headquarters are in Princeton but it is planned to move them to Washington,
DC. Gallagher is a right-wing syndicated columnist and author of five books.
One reason she says she opposes same-sex marriage is the possibility that it
may lead to children and she has "a suspicion of men who want to get close
to children while depriving them of mothers." George is Professor of Jurisprudence
and a leading proponant of “natural law.”
Camp Meeting Association NOT Part of 
Readings
Essential Reading
**********************
By Kim Byham
NOM has played a major role in opposing same-sex marriage in California, Maine,
New York, and New Jersey and has vowed to make repeal of the recent District
of Columbia marriage equality law its next target.
NOM was the principal contributor to Stand For Marriage Maine, the organization
that successfully led the effort to repeal the legalization of same-sex marriage
in Maine. According to reports published as of October 23, 2009, NOM provided
63% ($1,600,000) of the total raised by Stand For Marriage Maine ($2,547,8600).
An additional $512,820, or 20% of the total contributed to Stand For Marriage
Maine was provided by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland.
According to its own claims, NOM spent more than $600,000 to influence the January
vote by the New Jersey Legislature on marriage equality through radio and TV
ads, and robo-call technology.
NOM’s polling is conducted by Scott Rasmussen, president of the Ocean
Grove Camp Meeting Association.
Carrie Prejean, one time Miss California, was a principal spokesperson for NOM
until her nude photos and masturbation videos became public.
In April 2009, NOM began a "2 Million for Marriage" (2M4M) initiative
with the intention of organizing two million activists nationwide. The campaign
used an advertisement, "Gathering Storm", in which actors posed against
a dramatic storm-cloud background voiced opposition to same-sex marriage. The
actors in the ad mention three situations:
1. A California doctor who is allegedly forced to choose between her religious
faith and her work
2. A “member” of “a New Jersey church group” which is
“punished by the state for opposing same-sex marriage”
3. A Massachusetts parent who is supposedly unable to prevent the state from
teaching her children that same-sex marriage is acceptable.
The second, of course, refers to Ocean Grove. Never mind that the Camp Meeting
Association doesn’t have “members.” And it is not exactly
a “church group.” [See article “Camp Meeting Association NOT
Part of the Methodist Church’] But it was undeniably not “punished
for opposing same-sex marriage.” Marriage was not the issue. The request
was to hold a civil union ceremony, which even the Roman Catholic Church in
testimony before the New Jersey Senate says it now supports. More specifically,
the Camp Meeting Association was found to have commited a civil rights violation
by denying equal access to a public accomodation.
New York Times columnist Frank Rich described the "Gathering Storm"
advertisement as "an Internet camp classic", and it was hilariously
parodied by Stephen Colbert and the website Funny or Die.
Perhaps very few people seeing “Gathering Storm” know that it refers
to Ocean Grove nor that the dispute is over civil unions and not marriage, but
neither of the other two examples are related to same-sex marriage. Thus we
should not be surprised that there is distortion of the Ocean Grove dispute
to serve the purposes of the extreme right-wing.
the Methodist Church
By Kim Byham
Many folks in Ocean Grove and beyond are under the mistaken impression that
the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association is part of the United Methodist Church.
That is not true in any sense. Although the full name of the Camp Meeting is
the “Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association of the United Methodist Church,”
this does not mean it has any legal association with the Church.
The old saying is “If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks
like a duck, it’s probably a duck.” But just having “duck”
in the name, as in a duck-billed platypus (a mammal) does not make it a duck.
The platypus is even one of the only mammals that lays eggs, but it is not a
bird.
In order to be part of the United Methodist Church, an entity must have a relationship
to a Conference. The term “Conference” is uniquely Methodist and
often confuses outsiders. It refers both to a geographic area (a “diocese”
in Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Episcopal Churches; a “presbytery”
in the Presbyterian Church) and to the governing body of that area (a “convention”
in the Episcopal Church, and a “presbytery” for the Presbyterians,
who, like the Methodists use the same terms for both). All individual congregations
are either part of a Conference or they are not part of the United Methodist
Church. Similarly, entities such as church camps, retirement homes, schools
and colleges, and missionary enterprises all report either to a Conference or
to General Conference, the national body (although it includes several Conferences
outside the United States.)
The Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association has no formal relationship with the
Greater New Jersey Conference of the United Methodist Church. It gives no report
to Annual Conference, as all entities associated with the Conference are required
to do. It takes no direction from Conference.
Nor was the Camp Meeting Association ever part of the Conference (thus not akin
to some colleges which were once associated with a church but are no longer).
The OGCMA was founded by a group of clergy and laypeople, most of whom were
from New York. Many streets in Ocean Grove are named after prominent New York
Methodists, while none are named after New Jersey Methodists not directly associated
with Ocean Grove. The founders never wanted to be associated with the New Jersey
Conference (or Conferences, as there were two prior to 2000). They could have
been; there were Conference-sponsored Camp Meeting Associations. The only other
New Jersey Camp Meeting chartered by the State Legislature to act as a quasi-municipality
was the Mount Tabor Camp Meeting. Mount Tabor, which ceased to be a functioning
Camp Meeting in 1909, was founded by and reported to the then Newark Conference
of the Methodist Episcopal Church (predecessor of the United Methodist Church).
Finally there is confusion that because all the voting Camp Meeting Association
Trustees must be members of the United Methodist Church, ten of whom must be
clergy, and because the current bishop of the Greater New Jersey Conference,
Sudarshana Devadhar, is one of the 46 trustees, that this makes it part of the
Methodist Church. The bishop does not serve ex officio (because he is the bishop),
but rather was elected as an individual by the other trustees. Nor does the
requirement that the voting trustees be Methodists make it a church any more
than a country club that limits its membership to “Christians” is
a church organization.
This misunderstanding is pervasive. In a letter to the Connecticut Legislature
in April 2009, four law school professors made the error: “… the
state of New Jersey revoked the property tax exemption of a beach-side pavilion
owned and operated by a Methodist Church, because the Church refused on religious
grounds to host a same-sex civil union ceremony.”
As a lawyer I was embarrassed by the sloppiness of these professors. We must
all be careful in our language in describing the situation in Ocean Grove.
Kim Byham is a lawyer, an expert in church history and canon
law, and a member of the Ocean Grove United Board.
**********************
