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From: Susan Edel
I received the mailing from Minnesota for Marriage and cannot remain silent any longer.
I certainly support everyone’s right to an opinion about the marriage amendment even though I cannot support the amendment and will vote no because I view it as a civil rights issue. However, I am very disturbed about lies and distortion of the truth. The mailing states “Religious groups who have refused to make their facilities available for same-sex couples have lost their state tax exemption.”
The only example I have been able to find is a Methodist church in New Jersey. The New York Times reported “erroneously” that the church in Ocean Grove, New Jersey, had been stripped of a tax exemption worth $500,000 a year because they refused to allow a same-sex couple to have a marriage ceremony in their pavilion. The church has not lost its tax excmpt status for its worship space. What has been contested is a pavilion on a boardwalk which is sometimes used as worship space. The ruling is only about this piece of property and has everything to do with whether it should be allowed tax exempt status as a worship space. It is nothing to do with the church not agreeing to allow a same-sex marriage to be performed on this property.
How much of the rest of the mailing is a distortion of the truth?
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