Ocean City rally attacks state health standards

More than 100 gather in park to to support school board slate and hear speeches, including from conservative Christian leader

OCEAN CITY – More than 100 people gathered across from City Hall at 5 p.m. Thursday for a combination protest, political rally and Christian revival meeting.

The hour-long rally at Mark Soifer Park centered around three candidates running for the Ocean City Board of Education who vehemently oppose the new state Comprehensive Health and Physical Education Standard approved by the school board in late August. 

However, it went beyond that to invoke themes from the culture wars in the nation surrounding gays, lesbians and transgender rights, and what they call the “indoctrination” and “grooming” of children.

The three candidates who spoke were Robin Shaffer, Catherine Panico and Liz Nicoletti, all of whom have been vocal at school board meetings over the past year and were among those who asked the board to vote against the standard. 

The board voted 6-5 in favor of the standards. 

Most of the rally signs were asking the state to “repeal sex ed learning standards, replace gender identity indoctrination sessions and restore parental rights.” Others included those supporting the three candidates and at least one saying “shame on” the board members who voted to adopt the standard.

The candidates each spoke to those gathered, bracketing an invited speaker, the Rev. Gregory Quinlan, who is president and executive director of The Center for Garden State Families based in Parsippany.

Quinlan offered a fiery, Bible-infused speech condemning homosexuality and claiming state programs are “grooming” children for sex traffickers.

He said his group is an unapologetic advocate for Christian families. Quinlan opened with a Bible verse and conducted a call-and-response from his audience, complete with shouted responses and “amens” from those gathered, responses that continued with the other speakers.

“In the beginning the Creator made them male and female … it was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve in Eden,” he said. “It was male and female. Man and woman,” he said, adding the verse referenced “mother and father, not his daddy and daddy’s roommate. He’s not leaving his two mommies.”

Quinlan said Jesus “defined marriage, defined family, defined sex. Do you see LGBTQIA-XYZ anywhere in that definition?” The crowd shouted an emphatic “no.”

“No one is born gay,” he added, claiming that is backed by a scientific study. “So why are we imposing that on the babies? On the children?”

Quinlan said state programs are indoctrinating children about being gay or transgender from a young age. 

“We are putting a lot of ideas in the heads of our children that are wrong, biologically wrong, morally wrong and they’re unsafe and this has to stop,” he said to cheers from the crowd.

A flier the group handed out to attendees claims the state Department of Education policy is to “sexualize, indoctrinate, and groom your children. Why? Sexualizing your children is profitable — there is huge money in abortions, fetal tissue sales, sex trafficking and health services.” 

Half of the four-page flier was geared toward helping parents set boundaries and opt their children out of the health curriculum for parts they find objectionable. The back page offered seven ways of “How to win the cultural war and protect your children,” including running for school board.

A second handout from the group “highlights the ugly” in the health standard. It also asserts “an intentional global assault” disguised as sex education to protect them from sex traffickers, prevent disease and pregnancy.” 

The real intent, it asserts, is to “destroy the natural family” and includes Critical Race Theory, social and emotional learning, and, as Quinlan put it, “to push the environmental religion on you and on your children.”

He said the education goes beyond that to teach gender identity in preschool through second grade, masturbation in fifth grade and anal sex in eighth grade “brought to you by Tammy Murphy. That’s right, murderous Murphy’s wife, anal sex Murphy. It’s shameful, but that’s what we’ve got with the governor and first lady.”

He said the school districts let children decide their gender identity and parental consent is not required. 

“Other school districts stood up against this, so why didn’t Ocean City? You’ve got six bad eggs on there and they all gotta go,” Quinlan said, referring to the school board members who voted in favor of the new standards.

“This is the sexual exploitation of minors. This is illegal … you cannot sexually exploit our children. That’s what has to stop,” he said.

He claimed people who voted for the standards “are grooming your children” for sex traffickers. “The only way for it to stop is for people like you to stand up,” he said. “We cannot surrender our children to a government that wants to use them for sexual exploitation.”

Candidates deride health standards

“We are here today because of the unconscionable, disgraceful vote by the Ocean City Board of Education on Aug. 24 to approve new standards that include radical sexual and gender orthodoxy,” Shaffer said. “These were standards pushed by an extremist New Jersey Education Association and Gov. Phil Murphy.” 

He said many Ocean City stakeholders spoke out against the standards for more than a year, fearing it would oversexualize kids, but their “pleas to the board fell on deaf ears.”

Shaffer said while Ocean City students’ performance dropped in math and reading after two years of pandemic disruptions, the board still voted for “the perverse new sex and gender standards.”

He acknowledged that administrators and teachers have a daunting task in developing the curriculum around the standards and how families can opt out. Shaffer said some families have decided to opt out of the district entirely.

“If this curriculum is introduced, we stand to lose many more children from good Christian families. And we stand on the precipice of further erosion of the boundaries between state, family and faith,” he said. 

Calling it a slippery slope, he said people need to work with education leaders to “ensure we don’t slide further into teaching curricula that is overly political or advances social justice, CRT (Critical Race Theory) and even DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” narratives.

Shaffer said the “mandate to teach radical gender ideology was wrong. And our Board of Education was wrong in going along with it,” pointing out the members of the board who supported adopting the state standards. He noted three of them — Dr. Patrick Kane, Dr. Charles Roche and Ryan Leonard — are up for re-election in November. 

Shaffer is running against Leonard and former board member Dale Braun for the one-year unexpired term Leonard was appointed to fill until the end of December.

Panico and Nicoletti are running for the three three-year terms against incumbents Kane, Roche and Gregory Whelan (who voted against the standards) and newcomer Kevin Barnes. The top three in the voting will win the three seats and the top one in the other race will win the unexpired term.

Panico asked the crowd to show up at board meetings to let their feelings be known.

“They assured us that we can opt out (of the curriculum), that they have our back. That they have kids, too. ‘Trust us.’ I heard all of that from our administrators and our board of ed. I don’t trust anybody,” she said.

Panico wants to protect her kids “from all of this” and said district officials “are trying to pull the wool over our eyes” with the opt-out provision that won’t work. “It’s not going to guarantee the kids won’t hear it on the playground or from their peers.”

Panico said she wanted something stronger and to have “guardrails” on other things. “I don’t know if you’re aware, but we have a gender-neutral bathroom in our high school. We have a gender-neutral locker room.”

“What happens when we have someone transitioning their gender, a teen? How are we going to handle that? Will they change in the same locker room or be required to go somewhere else?” Panico said. “There are so many logical, sensible approaches that we can come up with and we’re not looking at them effectively.”

She commended the five board members who voted against the standard.

“All is not lost. We’re not going to yield, and if this is any indication of that, I appreciate everybody coming and speaking up. The louder we get, the better.” She asked the audience to vote for the slate.

Nicoletti said she is from Wilmington, Del., where she had her kids in a Christian school, but had a second home in Ocean City. Because private school was getting expensive, they brought their kids to Ocean City three years ago.

“We are raising our kids here,” she said. “I cried when I pulled out my kids from a biblical world view education and I put them here.” She noted they love being in Ocean City and that her children are playing sports.

After having mandates forced upon them because of the COVID-19 pandemic, she said, “Now we’re up against this curriculum. Children have a hard enough time figuring out who they want to be as a human being and now there is another layer on it. Now they have to decide what kind of a sexual being they’re going to be.”

She said pastor Matt Maher of Coastal Christian is teaching the biblical world view of how society is trending. “We’re sexualizing our children.” She said her son had to fill out a form this week about his gender. “He is a boy. That’s offensive to me. I raised my four children and I’ve never asked them what their pronoun is.”

Nicoletti said she did not want to run for school board with Shaffer and Panico last year but felt “called” to get involved. The new standard wouldn’t have been approved, she added, if the trio had been elected last year.

Nicoletti said, “it’s all about the money. We’ve pimped out our kids. I’ve been dying to say that. That’s what it’s called. Let’s pimp out our kids, take the money, and do the minimal teaching on this, but we have to say it. A second-grader has to define reproduction? Are you kidding me?”

She said the voters have to hold the board accountable for implementing the standard.

Talking about fears about running for office, she said, “I have to trust God in the process and know that he is in control of our little town … I’m so excited to do this journey with all of you.”

“We need to get these three people elected to school board,” said Ethel Hermenau, who was emceeing the event. She noted the congregation from her church in Egg Harbor Township years ago went en masse to stand up to the school board there. “We’ve been fighting this for a couple years now,” she said. 

There were additional speakers, including an Ocean City High School student and two pastors who offered prayers to begin and end the event. Afterward, the remaining audience members walked over to have a group portrait taken on the steps of City Hall.

SEE RELATED STORY HERE

– STORY and PHOTOS by DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff