Answers In Genesis scuttled their big boat: it just became too obvious that the Ark Park was going to be a sectarian religious establishment to proselytize their weird little sect, so Kentucky will not grant tax incentives to the Ark Encounter. There goes $18 million!
“As you know, since the filing of the original incentive application in 2010, we have strongly supported this project, believing it to be a tourism attraction based on biblical themes that would create significant jobs for the community,” wrote Stewart in a letter to Ark Encounter’s attorney. “However, based on various postings on the Answers in Genesis (AIG) and Ark Encounter websites, reports from Ark Encounter investor meetings and our correspondence, it is readily apparent that the project has evolved from a tourism attraction to an extension of AIG’s ministry that will no longer permit the Commonwealth to grant the project tourism development incentives.”
AiG has replied with a big billboard:
Oh, I don’t know. Maybe we can’t sink it, but I think AiG’s own stupidity has just punched a big hole below the waterline, and she’s leaking money badly.
Why have they not asked GOD to fund their project?
What does god need with a theme park ship?
This is the boat that never ends, Yes it goes on and on my friends! Some people(Morons) started building it not knowing what is was, and they will continue building,, it,,, forever,,,, just,,,,, because,,,, ,,,” repeat…. “
It is so cute how they blame liberals rather than themselves. It seems quite clear they scuttled this ship through their own hubris, by directly stating they planned to discriminate based on religion, something they indicated they would not do. I suppose they likely felt it would not matter, the project had the support of government since 2010, and figured they could do anything and it would not matter.
I thought there were a few lines about pride somewhere in the Bible. Perhaps they should take a look.
Oh, it was “an extension of AIG’s ministry” all along—but I do rather appreciate the sting of “evolved” right there.
Incidentally, the term ministry has been forever ruined/greatly improved for me ever since a friend’s phone autocorrected kinkster to minister. Oh, for those untender ministrations….
Reading the letter AiG was sent about this, I am struck by how clearly it demonstrates the true intentions behind the project. I think it was pretty clear before this time, but it includes a pretty damning list of statements.
It took the state of Kentucky four years to realize what I saw in the first few seconds.
I’d like to know what answers Genesis, or the rest of the fecking bible, has for all the moral problems that have arisen since the iron age? I mean, what does it say about texting while driving, driving under the influence, internet scams, use of chemical weapons, etc.? Since it’s stuck in the past, it’s a crock of shit.
Feckin’ eedjits!
“Boohoo, I no longer get tax breaks that I only got through deceptive means in the first place, waah waah mean libruls”
AiG has a lot of nerve saying that we “can’t sink this ship”, since as far as I know their ship won’t actually float.
Well, the concept that the mythical/fictional babble is inerrant is about 10 kilotons of ballast to a wooden ship. One can only point and laugh as it can’t even float…..
The project “evolved”.
Heh.
‘Zackly what I thought when I read that; you can’t sink a ship that isn’t anywhere near water. Of course, if there were a catrastophic flood it still wouldn’t float…
They’re having fun with it.
Nice.
Not that I enjoy subjecting people to the bible, but I found this rather ironic.
Luke 14:28-30 “For which one of you, when he wants to build an
towerark, does not first sit down and calculate the cost to see if he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who observe it begin to ridicule him, saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.”Not that biblical literalists ignoring the bible is anything new, of course…
Yeah, Kentucky was having Origin of Species-type fun with it when they wrote the letter, but I’d rather see a line like:
Maybe they could convert it to a giant fish tank. You know, a multi-storey Carp Ark.
@ Zacheize
What a horrifying quote!
If my partner had ambitions towards a towering erection and laid my foundation but was unable to finish, I would be humbly and graciously thankful. Pointing and laughing doesn’t help. It just prevents future erections.
Luke must have been hanging out with some real jerks.
Actually the incentives weren’t that Kentucky was giving Ark Encounter money. Rather that certain taxes would not be paid to the state after the park was built and running. So Ham and AIG still had to come up with the funds to build their park, which they were having problems doing.
Good. Frankly the religious thing was the least of the reason that’s a terrible idea. ‘Tax incentives’ to businesses have been killing this country’s infrastructure piecemeal for decades. It’s bad enough when there’s actually some nugget of real economic activity at the center of it, like a factory or something (not that they ever stay any longer than the tax breaks, or hire as many people as they promise, but at least for a while something’s actually being made/done there), but tourism as economic development is a complete mug’s game; tax incentives for a ‘tourist attraction’ is a shit plan from the ground up, no matter what the ‘attraction’ is supposed to be.
As a former resident of Kentucky, I cannot overstate the amount of schadenfreude I’m experiencing right now.
@ Al Dente:
Well, that ignores all the work that went into the highway offramp to this “tourist attraction”. As I recall, it was to the tune of an $11 million project. Money had already been spent.
Um, what do “intolerant liberals” have to do with it? Seems to me the project was sunk by AIG being unable to conduct their business according to the law (which the Bible does actually command, you know). Or is the billboard meant as: “Yeah, we lost this time but we’ll win in the end! Just you wait and see!!”
Anyways, shouldn’t these God-fearing conservatives be against accepting government help in the first place?
Welcome back my friends, to the ark that never ends, we’re so glad you could attend, come inside come inside.
There beyond the glass is a real horse’s ass, be careful as you pass, move along move along…
I don’t know. I’m sure they have intolerant friends of all stripes, so you’d think they would at least acknowledge their intolerant conservative friends as well. Don’t we all deserve to be bullshitted by AIG with the same lack of honesty and integrity?
consciousness razor #2:
You win all of the Internets for that fabulous Star Trek reference. Brilliant.
You can’t sink something that doesn’t even exist!
its OK about the highway off ramp it will make it easier to sell the place as a development sight when they finally go bust.
if that is not plan B already.
uncle frogy
“evolved from a tourism attraction to an extension of AIG’s ministry”
That wasn’t any evolution, that was intelligent design. Or, given that it wasn’t hard for even ‘random’ internet bloggers to find out along with the state, more like capsizing design.
@23 Eamon Knight
You see the conservatives consider tax cuts just returning what’s rightfully theirs.
@19 Al Dente
Tax incentives are the same as giving someone money – as long as you meet the conditions a tax incentive means “your dollar is worth more dollars”, so the idea was “if you build it we’ll give you money.”
Love it when intolerant pustules whine about others being intolerant of their intolerance.
Thank fuck we don’t even have to move a finger to sink that monstrosity :)
‘Intolerant liberals’ are simply anyone who thinks that religious ministries shouldn’t get free money from the government to fund their religious work or be allowed to flout laws.
“To all of our intolerant liberal friends” – 100% passive aggressive petulance.
You mean
Psalm 16:18 Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.
Well, this is A₦$₩€R$ I₦ ₲€₦€$I$, so your argument is invalid! Checkmate!!
What does the billboard say? I can’t see the image and the alt/title text isn’t helpful.
Unsupported ships? Well, personally, I ship FlutterDash.
…that’s not what we’re talking about, is it?
@34 fwtbc
“For all of our intolerant liberal friends: thank god you can’t sink this ship.”
Astonishingly, with no hint of irony….
Clueless to the bitter end, that’s ol’ Hambo.
Of course you can’t sink the thing it’s on dry land for fuck’s sake!!!
To the idiotic assholes at AIG:
Fuck you and the boat you sailed in on.
Oh…wait.
Pah! I bet they're not even making it from really gophers.
I love the way they blame their 'intolerant liberal friends,' when it was their own blog-writings and their own correspondence that did them in.
Maybe we can’t sink it, but I think AiG’s own stupidity has just punched a big hole below the waterline, and she’s leaking money badly.
Considering how easy it would have been to actually staff the Ark park with a rule that would have passed the non-discrimination test but still had them at 98% creationist in northern Kentucky, I’m suspicious. I’m suspicious that AiG is playing “The Producers” game here and has no intention at all of opening an Ark park. This whole thing smells like a scam to steal a lot of money from donors.
I mean “never attribute to conspiracy what could be just as easily explained by human stupidity” is the rule that I live by, so it’s probably just them being idiots. Still it’s a lot easier to pocket a few million dollars from a multi-million dollar boondoggle that never gets built than it is to earn it from a functioning amusement park.
But what about the intolerant liberal enemies? Or intolerant radical friends? Intolerant radical enemies? Can we sink the ship?
Ironically, given that AiG’s problems seem to stem from public comments they made, it appears that it is not intolerant liberals, but indeed loose lips that sink ships.
Me thinks they did NOT find the Loophole they thought they found. That, ‘government cannot act out of religious reasons, ever.’ So the loophole is that, the tax breaks have to be given to them, because they are a religious site and the government can’t interfere with their funding. And that’s why they proudly announced that all the construction workers would have to take a faith pledge to be allowed on the site. They had to ‘double-down” on the religious aspect to challenge the gov into upholding the literal interpretation of the 1st Amendment.
To my “intolerant liberal” eye; I see that loophole become a noose to hang little Hamster out to dry (his Flood soaked clothes). bwahaha!!11!1
We don’t need to sink your silly boat, Ham. You know as well as we do that it would fall apart all by itself shortly after hitting the water.
Too bad, in one respect that Ham’s Folly won’t be built; any visiting engineer would be able readily to point out such a structure made from wood could not possibly hold together in still water much less in a prolonged weather event whilst being heavily laden with a numerically impossible volume of critters and supplies. (Yes, others here have offered much the same thought.)
Well, everyone knows that if shooting my mouth off publicly leads to losing my totes deserved tax breaks*, that’s just censorship and persecution and librul meanies taking away my Freeze Peach. Thanks, Obama!
*Deserved because I would be totally creating jobs for the right people if you moochers and takers would just shut up and gimme your money!
@28 UncleFroggy
I have friends who live off the same exit as the Ark Park. It doesn’t have much at it beyond a gas station, a Mexican restaurant, and a motel. It’s mostly residential/farming with people owning a couple of acres or more. There’s not much out there to develop.
Grant Co and Williamstown really lost out when they sold that land for almost nothing to AIG.
That oughta annoy the repigfuckans.
A tax break is functionally equivalent to handing someone a bag of money. Granting tax incentives of this type is almost always a bad idea, even if the business doesn’t exist primarily to push religion and openly discriminate. If people want lower business taxes, then fine, but they should be given to all businesses, not as a way to favor one at the expense of others.
At any rate, this is only the icing on the cake. Ham’s ambitions are too grandiose and he can’t come up with enough suckers to fund it all. Remember when they were trying to sell junk bonds?
@ wcorvi # 7
I have a feeling they saw it in the first few..I dunno, minutes? What it really took them 4 years to do was admit that it was not going to profit them the way they thought it would.
@ Travis # 4
It is a can’t not, discriminating based upon religion is something that they “can’t not” do given what it is they are trying to accomplish. On The Atheist Experience message board we have had some long conversations about how what many a Xtian tries to believe in is a contradiction. Paraphrasing here, they want something that you can observe so that you can believe in it yet not observe so that it is un-falsifiable and can’t be debunked, even if only hypothetically.
.
How do you not discriminate when the very basis of your organization is discrimination? Xtians say that they are oppressed, but only because they are having their freedom to oppress others and discriminate against them oppressed and discriminated against. I don’t think the state of Kentucky even had a problem with that discrinimation on the basis of religion, as long as they could benefit from it. When they could no longer benefit from it…
Obviously their faith is not as strong as it should be. If they pray really, really hard, and God likes them, they’ll get this thing built.
As a Kentuckioid, thank…….the FSM, I guess. Slowly but surely Kentucky is being dragged, kicking and screaming, into the latter part of the 20th century. (I have no hope for us getting to the 21st any time soon.)
“If you pray hard enough, enough money will fall from the skies to fund the project.”
“But how hard do we have to pray?”
“Hard enough to get money to fall from the skies, ye of little faith.”
Well of course you can’t sink something that will never be built.
Aaaand Ham continues to shoot himself in the foot…
That part about it being a religious organisation, Kenny my lad; that’s the problem, right there, with you receiving state funding.
I wonder if this can be spun as further evidence for the “War on Christmas”?
@ Tony # 58
The thought had crossed my mind. I almost added a little line to my last poast regarding that. I was going to say that if you think there is a “War on Christmas” just look at Xmas decorations being sold in ealry October and ask anyone working in the store if there is a “War on Christmas.”
.
The only War on Xmas is business trying to make even more money than they already do off of Xmas.
Or god is so embarrassed by his own temper tantrum he would rather forget the whole affair…and you know move on a tad!
If you skim through the letter from AiG’s lawyer at the end of the linked story, they don’t try to hide the fact that they’re a religious organization, they actually think that being religious gives them carte blanche to do anything they feel like, even if it’s against the law, and still receive free taxpayer money. In this case, they want to practice illegal hiring discrimination. They even cite the Hobby Lobby case in their favor. What their flunky lawyer doesn’t seem to get is that even in that badly flawed decision, the court majority agreed that preventing discrimination was a compelling government interest and was not something that a religious exemption could be granted for.
Anyway, I’m all in favor of AiG taking this hopeless case to court and wasting a couple million more of their ill-gotten gains. I doubt they will. They’re not even remotely close to raising enough funds to break ground, so the government tax incentives mean very little. Besides, it gives them another excuse to wallow in their imagined persecution.
I’m reminded of the George Carlin riff on the inherent contradiction of the Christian God being viewed as both all powerful but always broke and begging for money.
I doubt they would even be trying to take this route in response to the denial without the Hobby Lobby case. Maybe it’s not a case where a religious institution is being forced to comply with a law that offends their religious sensibilities, but I have absolutely no doubt that AIG will attempt to argue, in court, that the denial of tax incentives solely because of their religion-based employment practices is now illegal in this new, post-Hobby Lobby world.
You forget, this is the ideal scenario for raising money from the great unwashed. Big scary atheist government illegally discriminating against a poor widdle Christian organization that just wants to make sure all their employees are God-fearing trustworthy Christians.
Indeed they’ve already started. From Ham’s blog post:
Why is AIG and Kent Ham trying to suck at the teat of the government anyway? Socialists! Commies! Libruls!
Ham is a big fan of the “In God We Trust” motto on U.S. money, so he’s trying to collect as many as possible.
I am not entirely certain that I see the difference between “based on biblical themes” and “extension of AIG’s ministry.”
Maybe Ken knows the end is near and he is pulling the plug in it this way so he can blame liberal sinners and whip up some victim hood
So much win in this thread! :-)
September in Germany. :-Þ :-Þ :-Þ :-Þ :-Þ
Similar in France: Late-September / early-October I was starting to get advertising bumpf shoved through the mailslot. Not too much, but it was a bit amusing since there was also Hallowe’en bumpf…