In case you missed it, the internet has been buzzing about the new nighttime lighting display at the Ark Encounter, the Christian theme park in Kentucky. The purported full-scale replica of Noah’s Ark is now illuminated in the evenings with a rainbow motif, supposedly to remind people of the origin of the rainbow: Yahweh, an extraordinarily absent-minded omniscient deity, created rainbows after he killed every living being on Earth in a flood — except for Noah and family — and needed a visual aid to remind himself not to slay everyone again with water. Yahweh enjoys variety in his mass serial killings so he vowed that next time he will murder billions with fire instead of floods. I, for one, appreciate a deity who thoughtfully spends his time being creative about how he commits global homicide.
Anyway, Twitter is raving about the new very very gay light theme. Yes, from the outside, the ark looks like the world’s biggest gay disco, bedecked in all the bright colors of the gay flag. Sadly, inside it is still the same grim mind-deadening refuge of Bronze Age goatherds and their superstitious fears about life and nature, bereft of any advances in science and knowledge during the past few thousand years.
But, this toe-dip into fabulous queer aesthetics is just an amusing aside. The real story is how Ken Ham — the founder and head not-at-all-gay-and-pompom-wielding cheerleader of the Ark Encounter — has tried to cheat the government of millions of dollars. Ken is a strict Bible literalist, so I am sure that his translation of the full version of the famous scriptural quote reads:
“Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s … but if Caesar is dead then rip off the existing government for every last drachma or shekel that you can.” — Matthew 22:21 (Ham Revised Edition)
Making us pay taxes is just like tossing us to lions in the arena
Grant County, where the Ark Encounter is located, recently decided to place a surtax on admission tickets for theme parks in order to finance additional fire trucks and other emergency equipment in case they are needed at those venues. The Ark Encounter just might possibly require enhanced fire protection service because it’s authentic — you know, just like the Bible says, it’s made of wood. What could possibly go wrong jamming 5,000 fact-challenged idiots per day into a highly flammable boat building? Yahweh will surely protect those people, right? Oh wait, he did promise to burn people to death in the future so maybe an extra damn firetruck might be a wise precaution after all.
Now, some might cry that this is unfair targeted persecution because the Ark Encounter is the only theme park in the small county of less than 25,000 residents. But, lo, there has been a miracle! Tiny Grant County boasts yet another theme park, the secular and festive Williamstown Family Fun Park … Yahweh only knows how they managed to snag another top-drawer entertainment complex like that, but they did.
So, Williamstown Family Fun Park will also have to cough up an extra 50 cents per ticket for improved emergency services (or, more likely, raise the ticket cost by that amount). I guess that means Ken can’t whine about religious discrimination against his theme park. Oh wait, he can’t do that anyway, because he claimed it was a for-profit commercial entity rather than a religious institution when he hornswoggled Kentucky’s legislature and governor to grant him unprecedented tax incentives before building the park.
Yup, Ken asked himself “Would Jesus prefer a gaudy Vegas-like showpiece to turn a profit as Holy Grift in His Name or would he prefer that the state use its tax money to feed the hungry and clothe the poor?” Well, faster than you can say “Better Baptist Bible-believers bite bitter herbs behind the Burning Bush” he knew that filthy lucre would miraculously be cleansed of its sin once it fell into his grasping mitts, so he chawed and jawed until the government of the Bluegrass State decided to grant him his grifty wishes lest he hold his breath and turn blue.
God helps those who help themselves to everything in your wallet
He promised the politicians and public that the theme park would give a holy economic shot in the arm to a community in need. Gaggles of joyous Rapture-ready tourists would come not just to gawk at Ken’s grandiose realization of his fervid imagining of an event that never actually occurred but would also spend oodles of godly Christian cash outside of his park.
That’s why Brian Plants and Matt Griffith invested in the cleverly named Shem’s Snack Shack (Shem was one of Noah’s sons), where you can buy Biblically-correct lowbrow cuisine, like the Ark Dog, two-thirds of a cubit of ground-up animal parts. I’m guessing those animals are mostly cattle or pigs, but who knows, maybe it’s from a veritable menagerie just like the animals that Noah collected for the ark?
Unfortunately, the Ark Encounter’s visitors are penny-wise fundamentalist tourists. As any waitperson can tell you, they make lousy customers. They don’t drink so the dinner tab won’t include wine, much less expensive wine. They’re more concerned with your sins than with your cost of living so you might get a Chick Tract — gorily depicting your eternal torment in Satan’s domain — in lieu of a cash tip.
In short, they’re cheap. Shem’s culinary namesake can’t even afford to keep its doors open year round, closing for the slowest three months annually.
The rubes come to Grant County with loaded picnic baskets and ice chests and stay with friends, relatives, or hospitable members of local churches. Hotels and restaurants are for the unsaved; smart fundagelicals always find someone to mooch off and save their money for tithing and giving to televangelists who will send them a vial of actual tears wept by Mary of Bethany when her brother Lazarus was raised from the dead. Hallelujah, the whole family got to witness how a tiny sliver of humanity escaped Yahweh’s enraged killing spree and it cost nothing more than half a tank of gas plus $40-a-pop admission tickets. Praise Jesus!
Visitors to the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter are, for the most part, deeply religious people who are coming to see those two attractions and nothing else. That’s why the Ark Encounter is thriving but not the nearby communities.
— Ark Encounter hasn’t spurred nearby economy
So, the Ark Encounter has not turned into a blessed cash cow for the county or the state. Even worse, they gave away their rights to the tax-milk that the cow should be providing. Refunds of sales tax, vastly reduced property tax, and an $11,000,000 freeway interchange are just some of the costs that the public treasury is bearing on behalf of Ken’s vision of Heavenly Wonders Brought to Hillbilly Earth.
It’s a corporation, it’s a church, it’s both a dessert topping and a floor wax!
Originally, Ken’s anti-evolutionary science group, Answers in Genesis, had bigger plans for the park and filed for tax incentives accordingly. The state of Kentucky’s tourism board gave them a deal that would have been worth up to $43 million by rebating 25% of the sales tax collected on admissions, refreshments, and souvenirs — presumably figurines of Jesus riding a dinosaur or Darwin being speared with pitchforks in hell — over ten years. Apparently, not enough suckers with spare change have been born yet so they were unable to find sufficient financing.
AiG scaled down the project to just the ark, with the intention of eventually adding other features like a Plagues of Egypt thrill ride and a full-scale replica of the Tower of Babel. The bare bones, or bare ark, initial phase had its tax incentives reduced to a mere $18 million of public funds, not counting the freeway improvements and steep reduction of property taxes it would still receive.
This sweet sacrament of siphoning from secular coffers did not meet with universal approval. For some odd reason, some people and groups objected to public monies being used to promote a particular religion. Imagine that!
AiG went to court and won. That might seem surprising except they — quite frankly — broke a few commandments in their testimony. They described the park as purely secular, a for-profit, non-religious commercial endeavor, open to one and all. That might appear to be contradicted by their employment policy, which mandates that employees be born-again Christians who must sign a Statement of Faith rejecting abortion, evolution, and same sex marriage, among other things, and regularly attend a Bible-believing church. Sounds completely secular to me!
What the government giveth, the government taketh away. And holier-than-Yahweh-himself Ken has no intention of letting the state grab back so much as one thin dime of his the Lord’s loot. So, Ken came up with a brilliant plan to stiff the public and make them pay the full cost of protecting his visitors from being incinerated alive: he sold the property to a newly created non-profit religious ministry for $10. Yes, that’s ten dollars, not ten million.
Where two of you are gathered in my name, another will be there to cheat you both
It seems like a pretty heavenly discount, considering that the property has an appraised tax value of approximately $48 million — and tax appraisals are generally way, way lower than actual commercial sale value. With its new status as a religious non-profit, the Ark Encounter becomes exempt from the 50-cent per ticket safety fee.
Well, that went over with the government like a fart in church, so to speak. Kentucky’s tourism board notified Ark Encounter that with its change in status it no longer qualifies for that $18 million in sales tax rebates. Ha, Ken has been thwarted once again by His Satanic Majesty in the form of the Commonwealth of Kentucky!
Not so fast. Yahweh works in mysterious ways, you know. Well, at least his grifty accountants and self-styled prophets do. They find the mysteries of the tax code a treasure trove of clawbacks and other bennies to ensure that every last widow’s mite never leaves their pockets the Lord’s storehouse. As a religious ministry, the Ark Encounter will be exempt from property tax, corporate income tax, and similar insufferable financial burdens, just like a church.
Losing that sales tax rebate may very well end up being small potatoes compared to what Ark Encounter will save over time — and don’t forget they already got that nifty new freeway interchange to make it easy for the pilgrims to cruise in to get fleeced by boneheaded pseudo-science.
Praise the Lord and pass the collection plate. Yahweh bless America, land of the freedom to grift and home of the braying and praying chuckleheads who lucratively exploit the ignorance and stubbornness of their fellow citizens.
I’m not a CPA nor a tax attorney but, as a layman, these double-dealing shenanigans seem kind of dicey to me. Shuffling assets around with 99.9% lopped off the value and claiming capitalist profiteering in one breath but religious freedom in the next — well, it seems more slippery than a talking snake offering an apple that will make you wise as a god. When Robert Mueller is done getting to the bottom of the Trump syndicate’s morass of malfeasance maybe he should take a shot at figuring out the flimflams of Ken and AiG.
Don’t miss this opportunity of a lifetime or Satan will eat your brains
Now I’ll tell you about the Biblical theme park I could really support. Heck, I’d even be willing for some of our tax dollars to be spent to support it: Moses’ Journey to the Promised Land.
The idea is you take busloads of fundamentalist tourists to the entrance of the park, located in the Mojave desert. As they mill around inside, hordes of “Egyptians” in war chariots chase them and they flee in panic, then spend 40 years wandering around to find the exit. The only major expense will be using a crop duster every night to spray “manna” for them to collect in the morning and pound into cakes or wafers (nobody knows exactly what manna was, so we’ll just crush granola bars).
Think about it. If they’re wandering around the desert for two score years, they won’t be voting or knocking on your door to share their “good news” that you can escape eternal torture and damnation by reciting an incantation.
Who wants to invest in my project? Do I hear an “Amen!”?
Fine, then. If none of you want to invest in this great idea then I’ll just get Mexico to pay for it.