I hate it when it turns out I'm not a paraoid nutjob...

[Lemur]

It's owned by the church, and they perform church services there. What more do you want?

Actually, doing a little more reading, it seems the situation is rather more complicated than the NPR article let on. Apparently the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association owns the entire boardwalk in the town, as well as much of the town itself, as well as 1,000 feet of ocean (whatever that means). So the bulk of the town is owned by the church's holding company.

For the past two decades, everything that matters in Ocean Grove, specifically the beach, boardwalk and ocean front road, have been declared tax exempt. This was done because the Methodist leaders in Ocean Grove went to the State Department of Environmental Protection and asked the government to step in to get them off the tax rolls. That saves about $500,000 a year that otherwise Ocean Grove residents would have to pony up.

Further, according to U.S. Representative Frank Pallone (D-Monmouth), whose constituents include those in Ocean Grove, the Camp Meeting Association has been lobbying him for years--quite successfully I might add--for federal and state funds (when he was a state senator) that have gone directly into the community. When the Great Auditorium in Ocean Grove needed a new roof, Pallone helped get the Camp Meeting Association $250,000 from the state. Later, those same Methodist leaders would go to Pallone and ask for federal dollars to fix the Ocean Grove boardwalk, which was damaged in a 1992 storm.

So let me get this straight. The Methodist leaders in Ocean Grove say they are a private religious entity that has every right to prohibit civil unions from taking place in the community's pavilion, but at the same time they want to make sure they get as much PUBLIC money as possible to keep taxes down and keep the community resources intact--using tax dollars from citizens outside of Ocean Grove. Talk about wanting it both ways. The Camp Meeting Association doesn't have a leg to stand on in their suit against the state saying that their first amendment rights are being violated because civil unions go against the United Methodist Church's Book of Discipline.

So you've got a holding company which owns the entire sea coast of the town, takes all the state and federal dollars it can lay its greasy mitts on, declares the coast to be "public" when it suits them for grants and tax breaks, but declares it to be private and religious when a couple of Jewish lesbians want to have a marriage ceremony.

No, I think there's a lot more to this case than I'm In UR Churches Gayzoring Teh Lawsuits.

-edit-

A little more detail:

The beach and Boardwalk Pavilion are open to the public and the Camp Meeting Association has accepted public funds for their maintenance and repairs. They also cite the Association's application to the State of New Jersey for monies under the state's "Green Acres Program", which encourages the use of private property for public recreation and provides a $500,000 annual property tax exemption. In their application for these funds, the Camp Meeting Association reportedly stated that the disputed areas were open to the public. U.S. Representative Frank Pallone, Jr. (Democrat), in whose Congressional district Ocean Grove is located, stated "they've taken state, federal and local funds by representing that they are open to the public."

And just to be clear: Nobody said that the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association had to allow the lesbians to marry anywhere. All the courts said was that land declared "public" for reasons of tax avoidance and grant-getting are subject to open access. If the church suddenly remembers that it wants to treat that self-declared "public" area as a private religious area, they're going to lose their public tax break.