A picturesque, seaside pavilion in Ocean Grove, New Jersey, owned and controlled by United Methodists since its creation in 1870, is described in its charter as a “portion of land skirting the sea, consecrated to sacred uses and with a single eye to the Divine Glory.” Almost 150 years later, this one-time site of religious revival meetings has become one of the many flashpoints nationwide between religious groups supporting the traditional definition of marriage and same-sex marriage proponents seeking to enforce antidiscrimination laws. Despite the Methodist group’s desire that no one use its pavilion for activities directly contrary to its religious identity, New Jersey’s Division on Civil Rights held in January 2009 that the Methodists must allow a lesbian couple to use the pavilion for their same-sex civil union ceremony. This finding is the subject of ongoing litigation in federal court. Using the Ocean Grove case as a prototypical harbinger of future conflicts, this Comment explains why same-sex marriage antidiscrimination laws pose a genuine and sincere theological problem for many religious institutions and explores some of the possible First Amendment defenses with which religious institutions might respond to such laws.

For religious groups of all stripes, a case like the pavilion controversy in Ocean Grove is anything but an isolated anomaly; it is instead a signal of an increasingly frequent wave of conflicts between same-sex marriage proponents and traditional religious organizations. The same-sex marriage movement has rapidly gained steam through landmark state supreme court rulings establishing a constitutional right to same-sex marriage or civil union despite the movement’s limited success in legislative spheres and, indeed, against legislative attempts to limit its spread.