Religious Right Watch: When ‘religious freedom’ and taxpayer funds collide

For many in the religious right, the prospect of gay and lesbian couples gaining full relationship rights is frightening, and their rhetoric is fraught with doomsday scenarios of pastors going to prison, forced homosexuality and men marrying box turtles. But in one such story — about how civil union laws resulted in a church’s being punished for denying a lesbian couple from marrying on church property — the rhetoric doesn’t meet reality.

Here’s how the Minnesota Family Council laid out its version of events for supporters:

“A recent decision in New Jersey found a Methodist church group, which refused to rent out its property for a civil union ceremony, guilty of discrimination which will mean either fines or a requirement that they rent out the facility for civil union ceremonies,” writes Family Council President Tom Prichard. “No doubt similar actions will be taken against churches once homosexual marriage becomes the law.”

National religious right groups agree. “The clash between same-sex unions and religious freedom has arrived, and that clash will increase,” said Mathew Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel, a Florida-based law firm and Christian ministry. “Whenever a right is granted to same-sex unions, then a right is taken from religious liberty and freedom of speech. Same-sex unions pose a serious threat to freedom of conscience and free exercise of religion.”

But what’s missing from the story is that the church in question, Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association, got tax breaks from the state of New Jersey because it has for years allowed the public to use its Boardwalk Pavilion for secular and religious events. The church also received state funding to improve the infrastructure around the pavilion. Harriet Bernstein and Luisa Paster requested to have their civil union ceremony at that pavilion and paid taxes that went to the church to pay for the pavilion.

The religious right is outraged that taxpayers would want to use a facility they helped pay for.

“This decision merely highlights where society is headed if homosexual marriage becomes the law of the land,” wrote Prichard. “There’s no doubt in my mind that homosexual activists and their kindred spirits will impose acceptance on those who disagree with them. Again, supposed claims of ‘tolerance’ and ‘respect for diversity’ are only a way one way [sic] street.”

But the New Jersey Division of Civil Rights was pretty clear when it handed down its ruling against the church on Dec. 29: “When it invites the public at large to use it, the Association is subject to the Law Against Discrimination, and enforcement of that law in this context does not affect the Association’s constitutionally protected right to free exercise of religion.”

It’s another case of the religious right’s wanting its cake (taxpayer funds) and eating it too (denying rights to gays and lesbians).