Creationist Ken Ham believes the earth is 6,000 years old and humans once co-habited with dinosaurs, he also apparently believes that the people ridiculing his tax payer-subsidized insult to the human intellect are responsible for the fact that it’s not living up to its promises.
According to local news reports, the Ark Encounter in Williamstown, Kentucky has let down the town’s business owners who were hoping it’d be a boon to their local economy — which is tremendously bad news for a project that was awarded huge tax breaks. Now Ham is lashing out, saying atheists and the media are responsible for his theme park’s underwhelming impact.
“Recently, a number of articles in the mainstream media, on blogs, and on well-known secularist group websites have attempted to spread propaganda to brainwash the public into thinking our Ark Encounter attraction is a dismal failure,” Ham wrote in a blog post on June 12. “Sadly, they are influencing business investors and others in such a negative way that they may prevent Grant County, Kentucky, from achieving the economic recovery that its officials and residents have been seeking.”
“Nowadays, it seems very few reporters in the secular media actually want to report facts regarding what they cover as news,” he continued. “When it comes to reporting on theologically conservative Christians like those of us at [Answers in Genesis], whose ideology they strongly oppose, many writers have an agenda to undermine Christianity as they file their stories.”
But according to local business leaders, the Ark’s tax payer incentives haven’t done much good for the taxpayers.
According to a 2014 analysis by Church & State, the Ham’s Ark was given “$18 million in state tax incentives to offset the cost of the park’s construction; a 75 percent property tax break over 30 years from the City of Williamstown (a town of about 3,000 near where the park will be located); an $11-million road upgrade in a rural area that would almost exclusively facilitate traffic going to and from the park; a $200,000 gift from the Grant County Industrial Development Authority to make sure the project stays in that county; 100 acres of reduced-price land and, finally $62 million municipal bond issue from Williamstown that Ham claims has kept the project from sinking.”
Speaking to the Herald Leader, local judge-executive Steve Wood said the Ark is a “bad deal for taxpayers.”
“It was a shock for me because I didn’t really know all the details. Maybe I should have,” he said.
Although the park claims to provide jobs for around 900 people, those applicants must sign a “statement of faith” declaring their belief in a 6,000 year-old earth. The form demands applicants profess “that homosexuality is a sin on par with bestiality and incest, that the earth is only 6,000 years old, and that the bible is literally true in order to be considered for the job.”
[H/T Alternet] Featured image via screen grab
