The Ark Park is nearly done, still violating the Constitution

January 21, 2016 • 1:00 pm

The Ark Park constructed by Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis (AiG) organization, featuring a life-sized Noah’s Ark and ancillary amusement, has been plagued by financial and legal troubles. There was difficulty getting enough money to build it (so they issued junk bonds), and then the state shut down its application because AiG wanted to hire only fundamentalist Christians as employees: a violation of federal civil rights law. Apparently, at least according to Newsweek, most of these obstacles have been surmounted and the Ark Park is set to open on July 7. Two issues remain.

Is taxpayer money funding the park? That would be a violation of the First Amendment, for the Ark Park, a literalistic presentation of the Genesis Flood story, is clearly a religious enterprise. According to Newsweek, yes, taxpayers will indeed be paying for the park, although indirectly:

Ham didn’t stand up when an assistant shuffled me [author Linday Tucker] into his office one Friday afternoon. He has railed against the media time and time again for, he says, falsely claiming that taxpayer money is going toward building the ark. When he speaks, he does so slowly, his words even and calculated. “No Kentucky taxpayer money is going to build the Ark Encounter,” he tells me. Several times.

Ham is telling the truth, but it’s a literal interpretation of the truth. The money used to build Ark Encounter came from donations of almost $30 million, plus $62 million in high-risk, unrated municipal bonds backed by the project’s future revenues. If Ark Encounter never makes significant profits (and bond documents warn that it may not), neither the city nor AiG is on the hook for the bond money. However, according to Mike Zovath, chief actions officer for AiG and Ark Encounter, the millions in tax dollars that will be rebated through the formation of the aforementioned TIF district* could go toward repaying the bonds and funding future attractions. What neither of them mentioned in conversations with me or in their many blog posts on the subject is that, as part of the TIF agreement, employees working within the TIF district will be subject to a 2 percent employment tax on gross wages for the next 30 years. In other words, $2 out of every $100 earned by people working at or around the park will go directly to paying off the attraction. So while tax dollars might not actually have been used tobuild the ark, a boatload that would otherwise go back into the community will instead be used to pay off Ark Encounter’s debt.

*A “TIF district” is a “tax incentive financing district,” and within this one, which encompasses the park and 1.25 miles around it, 75% of sales and real estate taxes collected go back to The Ark Encounter project. This is separate from the 2% employment tax. In both cases money that would go to the state is diverted to the religious enterprise.

Is the Ark Encounter violating civil rights laws? It’s not clear. The Park’s application was initially rejected because it vowed to have discriminatory hiring based on religion (something the park at first said it wouldn’t practice), asking employees to sign statements including “salvation testimony” and “a creationist statement of faith.” AiG objected, and the issue, as far as I know, is still in the courts, where the creationist group claims that it needs to hire on the basis of religion, for not doing so is a form of religious discrimination:

When I asked AiG general counsel John Pence about the company’s revoked promise of non-discriminatory hiring, he referred me to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. “That allows religious organizations to discriminate in hiring,” he says. “If you can’t hire religious people for a religious organization, you can’t function as a religious organization.”

But should taxpayers have to pay for that discrimination? Even Williamstown Mayor Rick Skinner, who has been criticized for being overly optimistic about the ark project, says no. “I don’t think they can do that and expect to get the tourism rebate from the state,” he tellsNewsweek.

“AiG is confusing what they have the right to do as a private organization with what taxpayers are required to fund,” says Greg Lipper, senior litigation counsel for Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “They’re saying Kentucky taxpayers should pay for them to expand a religious ministry. That kind of argument would make Thomas Jefferson turn in his grave.”

Although people have warned that the park will tank financially, drawing few visitors, I don’t agree. The Creation Museum makes lots of dosh, and I don’t see why the Ark Park, a monument to Recreational Confirmation Bias, wouldn’t as well. Or so I predict.

0129noahsark02
The 510-foot Ark in statu nascendi (photo courtesy of Answers in Genesis)

87 thoughts on “The Ark Park is nearly done, still violating the Constitution”

  1. You can say what you want, but that’s one helluva nice ark! Who says government money isn’t well-spent? (I wonder if it will float.)

    1. That one won’t, it’s built into the side of a building. In any case, I think floating would be the least of an Ark’s problems. Not breaking in two when it encounters it’s first swell is what I’d worry about.

      1. I would like to attend the park, though, and ask everyone I see why they didn’t build this thing to go to sea and sell cruises on it. The answers would be fun to hear.

  2. It might well succeed financially since it is in a region rife with religious fundamentalists. But its very design is evidence to the impossibility of Noah having built such a vessel. Photos from the site reveal the use of modern materials such as steel plates and bolts, and as can be seen above, cranes. And the plan for the animals, keeping them in cages inside the ark, has been widely denounced by zoo experts.

    1. Keeping animals in cages in this thing will demonstrate unequivocally that the arc story is a fantasy.

      1. Should. It won’t to the visitors. If they manage to have five animals in the ark, a leopard, some goats, some turtles, and a bird or two, the visitors will consider it a triumph.

        1. Unless they run out of goats. (H/T to Barnum, if not his ancestors and precedents.)

    2. Structural support in Noah’s day was provided by a special kind of steel-strength wood that no longer exists.

      Or God taught Noah how to make carbon steel but made him promise never to use it again. Or Noah forgot how during his post-flood bender.

      No?

      OK, God held the boards together with his magic. Same way he got the animals to fit, magic (the animals shrank as they walked through the door). Same way he got that insane amount of water to appear, and then disappear. Magic. It’s basically a story about God using magic to kill everyone and start over. The whole boat thing… it was just an act, a symbol of obedience, not an actual boat that was needed in any way to actually save animals from a flood. Don’t be silly… no real Christian believes a non-magical boat saved all of those animals, that would be ridiculous.

    3. This project could achieve a certain credibility were it built with only the materials, tools and labour available to a bronze age family. That this cannot be done (along with many other reasons) should make it abundantly clear how idiotic it is to regard the flood story as true. Unfortunately, there is no shortage of idiocy at AiG and among their followers.

      1. Yes, that would be a worthy project. Like people who have built Viking boats or Polynesian boats to try to prove that they could have sailed here or there in such a craft. How much better would this project be if they had tried to build a seaworthy Ark out of Noah-era tech and then drug it out to sea (it wouldn’t be powered of course) and lived on it for a month or two. I couldn’t conscience filling it with animals, who would all perish when the thing split in two during the first storm, if not sooner, so maybe they could fill it with a suitable mix of animal replicas.

          1. Despite his best efforts, it was impossible to adhere entirely to the biblical description of the Ark. Genesis describes Noah’s boat as made of “gopher wood,” but experts disagree over what this is.

            Instead, Huibers and his team built the boat by welding together the metal hulls of 25 barges into a single frame, which was then covered with Scandinavian pine.

            Perhaps “gopher wood” is carbon steel? I’m going to start making this claim whenever it comes up. That’s the beauty of religion, you can make up your own facts as you go along.

  3. Although people have warned that the park will tank financially, drawing few visitors, I don’t agree. The Creation Museum makes lots of dosh, and I don’t see why the Ark Park, a monument to Recreational Confirmation Bias, wouldn’t as well. Or so I predict.

    Its a much bigger facility with much higher operating costs, and IIRC the numbers they gave to the city in terms of “expected” visitors (as justification for their rebates) were on the order of a major theme park, not the quarter of a million a year the museum now gets. Now sure, I can envision everyone who now goes to the creation museum also going to the ark park. But in comparison, a place like Six Flags will get 25 million visitors a month – two orders of magnitude more. I don’t think the Ark Park is going to do numbers like that. So if it needs those sorts of numbers to stay solvent, it’s going to tank.

    So, IMO it’s much more like a Hollywood blockbuster than the creation museum was. They could make a huge amount at the box office and still end up in the red.

    1. Oops, that’s 25 million/year, not per month. Still an order of magnitude higher than the museum.

      1. I agree. Many of the 25 million visitors/per year are repeats. When young, I’ve been known to visit Great America theme park 4 times a year. I can’t imagine anyone ever visiting Ark Park more than once.

        1. I think this is what’s behind the Creation Museum’s annually declining attendance–few people ever go to the place more than once.

          1. According to the Sensuous Curmudgeon (https://sensuouscurmudgeon.wordpress.com/), who has been posting about this regularly, and quoted Answers in Genesis’s latest tax returns, the Creation Museum itself is losing money – I seem to recall expenses of $8M and income of $4M but I can’t find the story right now. The Creation Museum, as I recall, gets around 250K visitors/year; but the “official” estimate for Ark Encounter runs somewhere near 2M visitors/year. Seems unlikely in the long run, though I expect a bunch of people might go once just to see what the fuss is all about. And I understand that a bunch of the sideshows that were to be built in the original plans (petting zoo, etc.) are no longer in the plan, for lack of money, further decreasing the attractiveness of the “attraction”.

          2. Maybe they should put on new attractions? Say, each time there’s a new book added to the Buy Bull by their god (or a proto-Mormon con-man), then they could open up a new exhibition about it and get a fresh flush (geddit!?) of visitors.

    2. You underestimate the power of the south. Why, just Bo and Luke Duke alone could run the park, Daisy at the box office, and Enos for security.

  4. I asked on a creationist site how many people built the original Ark, and whether Noah recruited workers to help him and his sons knowing that all others would perish in the Flood.
    I was told to read the Bible.

    1. Thanks for all your hard work. You’ve been great employees. Here’s your last day’s pay. Um… spend it quickly.

    2. I see three construction cranes in the photo. I wonder which model Noah & Co. used.

  5. So this is the age we live…people abandoning protestant religions, because they are becoming educated, and people going to arc town, because they are infected with ignorance.

    It’s clear that science has been ruining everything since 1543, but not everyone is on board. We need a bigger arc!

    1. I had no idea who Kate Upton was, but now I want to join. I am sure trios are allowed since they make this stuff up as they go.

      1. Kate Upton? (Google google)

        Oh yep. If she fell in the water she’d float all right. 😉

        cr

        1. The difference between a lifejacket and a buoyancy aid (as per SOLAS regulations, which even the US adheres to) is that a lifejacket will turn an unconscious wearer upright in the water so that their mouth and nostrils are out of the water and the person can breathe, while a buoyancy aid won’t necessarily (or will only do so slowly.
          For some people, the distinction is pretty arbitrary.

    2. Don’t forget you have to bring your daughters and well … ouch … the next part of the story is not good!

  8. I say we start a Kickstarter for a Tower of Babel attraction. That’s the next step, right?

    1. I just remembered that that was an interesting story, since it shows that God feared that humans would get too powerful:

      3 And they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.”

      4 But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built.

      5 And the Lord said, “Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them.

      6 Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.”

      7 So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they ceased building the city.

      1. He (god) has kind of been a shit about humans learning and doing and striving since he first said to keep away from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

        So, in that one tiny aspect, at least, his followers really are following him, rather than just pretending to, as they do in most other matters (hey, if you want to read “in most other matters” as “those that affect their finances or lifestyle,” who am I to stop you?).

      2. “… since it shows that God feared that humans would get too powerful:”

        This was already known from Gen 3:21-24, when Adam and Eve left the garden and God left cherubims and a flaming sword to guard the garden. Couldn’t have those pesky humans sneaking up on Mr. Omniscient.

        1. From the LOLcat Bible:

          And all uv de Urf was lolcatspeekinkz usin’ lolcats werdz. 2 Whial teh menz be movin’ eest, they finded vallee in teh land uv Shinar an sitted ther. 3 Dey sed “hai, letz maek teh brix an make ’em harrd wif fiir.” So dey uzed brix for ston an bitumen (wtf izzat?) for mortar. 4 Den dey sed “hai, letz maek reel tall towerz for us so we be togethr forevr!”

          5 So, Ceiling Cat comeded down an saw teh men an ther towerz. 6 Den Ceiling Cat sez “Oh noes, if they all togethr after mah hi spot, they gonna get mah hi spot! 7 I gots’ta confuzzle ’em and stop ’em!” 8 Dat’s wai Ceiling Cat pwned ’em an dragd ’em away from ther towerz. Dey stop buldin’ after dat. 9 So teh towerz wuz calld Babel cuz Ceiling Cat made teh men babbul ther befor movin’ dem.

  9. Supposedly the Creation Museum has fewer and fewer visitors every year. Some watchers of AIG are saying it is not profitable now.

    1. I hope it lasts. I’ve only been to KY once, but if I ever find myself there again I think going to see these… spectacles… would be a great way to spend the day.

      The funny thing is that these things are meant to enhance faith, but I think they do the opposite. The more clearly you explain the Bible’s claims, the more ridiculous they seem. It is better for religious recruiting to keep all of this in a vague fog.

      1. My parents went in 2010 for a laugh. Had to sign a statement that they would show respect and not ridicule the exhibits.
        I still have the pamphlet they brought back.

        One of “Today’s Events”
        Jurassic Prank: A Dinosaur Tale
        Speaker Dr. Tommy Mitchell M.D.

        I’d go, but I don’t think I could control myself.

        1. LOL. Yeah, I can remember having to sign something like that when I went to the American Museum of Natural History. Oh, wait.. I didn’t.

          1. They also have surly guards, whose apparent motto is “toss out first, ask questions later.”

            The classic takedown of the creationist “museum” is still John Scalzi’s, here, beginning with the epic:

            “Here’s how to understand the Creation Museum:

            Imagine, if you will, a load of horseshit. And we’re not talking just your average load of horseshit; no, we’re talking colossal load of horsehit. An epic load of horseshit. The kind of load of horseshit that has accreted over decades and has developed its own sort of ecosystem, from the flyblown chunks at the perimeter, down into the heated and decomposing center, generating explosive levels of methane as bacteria feast merrily on vintage, liquified crap. This is a Herculean load of horseshit, friends, the likes of which has not been seen since the days of Augeas.”

          4. De nada. I’ve drawn attention to it frequently both here and elsewhere on the interwebs, if you catch my drift…

          5. Ah, the stable-owner getting a name-check.
            There is a company who make Archimedian screws (“augers”) for moving piles of warm, brown, moist matter – ground up rock from drilling – around on drilling rigs. I’ve always been impressed by the choice of name : “Augean”.

          6. Archimedes screws – first invented by Archimedes for e.g. lifting water out of rivers into irrigation channels.

            In recent decades most commonly used in sewage treatment works, for lifting raw sewage or sludge through a limited ‘head’ of a few feet. The big advantage (as compared with pumps) is that they’re virtually unblockable.

            The word ‘Augean’ may be even more appropriate to that use…

            cr

          7. Oh, it is VERY appropriate. I’d seen the company name and equipment repeatedly and thought “recognise, but can’t quite place …” so I Googled it and thought that it was extremely appropriate for what they do.

    2. Attendance reports are hard to find. Some reports show 400,00 in 2009 with a steady decline. Last reported figure I found was 254,000 in 2012. I believe hey installed a zip line in 2013 to attract visitors.

      1. Does their zip line trust in God, or in the science of materials and engineering construction to keep the users safe?

    3. The Creation Museum has never been profitable. The organisation Answers in Genesis as a whole did make some money in the past before 2010.

      Source

      I’m amazed at how much money goes on in the organisation.

    4. I was about to mention this myself. If I had the money and the means, I’d wait till the thing finally goes under, and then buy the property and turn it into a proper natural history museum. I hope someone actually does this, it would be a great middle finger to AIG.

      Of course, knowing how they think at AIG, anyone who bought the property would probably have to sign some agreement stating they won’t do such a thing.

      1. Of course, knowing how they think at AIG, anyone who bought the property would probably have to sign some agreement stating they won’t do such a thing.

        Just because they’re infected with the god-bug doesn’t mean that they’re total idiots.
        However, isn’t this what ‘front’ corporations are for?

  10. Oops! Looks like they got the wrong plans for the Ark — it should be round (a big coracle) according to this fascinating book by Irving Finkel, an amazing researcher at the British Museum: “The Ark Before Noah – Decoding the Story of the Flood.” Wonderful book.

  11. Whenever I look at a church being built, I mostly see an enormous waste of material and money with an unjustifiable environmental impact. This monstrosity is all that in spades, and the diversion of tax dollars, whether now or later, makes it all the more wasteful.

  13. Reblogged this on Nina's Soap Bubble Box and commented:
    There is a very small part of me that kinda wants to be a tour guide there, but mostly I want them to explain why, with modern equipment it took them so much longer than Noah the Drunk to do it, and now with any luck – this guy in the Scandinavian nations http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/30/world/europe/johans-ark-noah-dutch/ will sue for copyright infringement the way that Elvis Presley Enterprises Graceland did for the Graceland 2.0 replica mansion now having to name change http://www.thelocal.dk/20150903/elvis-presley-heirs-sue-danish-graceland USA vs Denmark: The Elvis round over and the Bible Round just beginning!

    1. I was hoping nobody would bring up the Dutch replica of the ark of noah. 🙁 Yes, we’ve got creationists too.

      1. I’m in Canada… we got them here too, mostly in Alberta…. the american Focus on the Family group has offices in British Columbia and they do think tank funding of conservative parties here…. my Dad was born in Iceland and Canada is looking to the Scandinavian nations… weird to think we’re national stage poised…

      2. Well, the Netherlands is a cycling nation, we love beer, we’re okay with same-sex attraction, we’re not so okay with migrants, we have a right-wing party that is kinda embarrassing and we love Borgen. The Netherlands is basically Denmark – but somewhere else! 😛

        1. You could cycle from the Land of Clogs to the Land of Nogs over the Oresund Bridge, couldn’t you? Might actually be an interesting and fun trip.

          1. I think it’s a motorway only. Crossing that bridge is still on my bucket list though.

          2. Challenge!
            (including AdminChallenge – are there footways? If not, there should be an argument WHY not?

    3. In the Noah story it took like 100 years, didn’t it? I’m very sure that if you went through the tour and asked them why they used the modern equipment they would say it was because they didn’t have 100 years to build it.

  14. Those perfectly round, large telephone poles are just relics of Noah times. I’m waiting for the fiberglass cover to be applied, just like in the bible. What a waste of good trees.

    First time I’ve seen a boat growing out of the side of a concrete building. Looks very original.

  16. Don’t think I’ll be buying any of those bonds. Any investor would be wise to look at the creation museum to see how Ham’s project performs financially. Oh, and as someone else said, what a waste of good trees.

  17. I’m lucky in that I don’t have to travel to Kentucky to see a life-size reconstruction of Noah’s Ark – we have one right here in Colorado. Although there seems to be a bit of disagreement between Sophisticated Theologians as to how big a cubit really is – the local version at Messiahville, just north of Denver, is much smaller than Ken Ham’s monstrosity – maybe animals were a lot smaller back then. Work on the Colorado ark seems to have stalled – they started back in 2004, but it doesn’t seem to have progressed very far recently.
    Map

    1. So much for creating a link to maps.google.com. If you want to see the magnificent Messiahville ark, point GoogleEarth to 40.0288607, -104.9704234

      1. Map link
        From the Streetview, you can just read the sign.
        “4242 Co. Road 6, Broomfield Colorado” from one visitation, and # 4496 on another visit. Which begs the question of how on earth these immensely high numbers on American street addresses get created. Surely there are not four and a half thousand other properties on this road. At around 250m per property, that would make this road nearly a thousand km long!

        1. An American friend explained to me that rural numbers are often distances from the start of the road or the nearest town. So 4242 is 4.242 miles along it.

          Don’t know if that applies in this particular case.

          cr

          2. Actually, it does work – you just have to know where zero is. In this case, Messiahville is 4.5 miles east of the Weld County line. Sometimes, especially on state highways, the numbers can get pretty high. There are some addresses in the 38000 range just west of Boulder, and that’s probably not a record.

            Other places in the west, e.g., Salt Lake City, are laid out on a regular cartesian grid, so you get addresses like 3920 S 700 E (although I don’t know if the units are miles). Efficient, but not a romantic as the English addresses like ‘The Cottage, Hogsbreath Lane, Leftbumshire’.

          3. “Efficient, but not as romantic as the English addresses like ‘The Cottage, Hogsbreath Lane, Leftbumshire’.”

            Though The Cottage will probably have a postcode like FH27DC which will specify it down to a few yards.

            My cousins in Cornwall, whose address (names changed) is
            Trecarn Gate,
            Higher Westwith,
            Wadebridge, Cornwall

            also have a postcode like WB85FG

            Their son once tried sending them a letter addressed just to
            ‘J & K Lambert
            WB85FG’

            Apparently it arrived.

            cr

          4. The general scheme MAY work. In this evample, it is 3pointSomething km from a west point, but 9.X km from an Easterly kettle hole.

  18. I wonder if they are hoping for ‘another’ world-wide flood; you know, like the one where the Grand Canyon formed and all the fossils were deposited? Incredibly, there are people who would stake their lives on the truth of this nonsense!

    I also wonder how they are going to find and stock this new ark with all the animals that have gone extinct since the ‘flood’? What happened to plants and bacteria and fungi and things on the first one?

    I really wonder if there is a flaw in the structure/workings of the brains of people
    who take the story of Noah’s Ark and the bible literally? So sad.

    1. But it says so in the Buy-bull, so it must be true!

      I was once involved in a mailing-list argument with a creationist who finally said “But if the story of Noah’s Ark is not true, then what faith can we place in the rest of the Bible?” So for him it just *had* to be true, regardless of how ridiculous it was, or else the rest the Bible might be false as well, and that was unthinkable to him.

      I sometimes want to ask these people “If the Bible said that bananas are bright blue, highly intelligent, and eat fish, would you believe it? If not, why not?” and wait for their answer.

      1. They would just say “But it *doesn’t* say that” and look at you pityingly.

        🙁

        cr

  19. the park and 1.25 miles around it, 75% of sales and real estate taxes collected go back to The Ark Encounter project.

    Hmmm, well I do try to avoid buying goods from American companies, but now I need to draw a circle around this place and really avoid buying anything from there. Or just from Kentucky.
    What – the existence of this Buy Bull park is going to harm businesses in the area? Who’d have thought it? And did the local tax office include that in their calculations?
    Location … 1.25 miles is about 7500ft? close to 2km. That would encompass pretty much the whole of Williamstown. So I think that’s an adequate discriminant. I’d still be very chary about buying anything from Kentucky, but I’ll just add Williamstown to my mental filter.

  21. Oh, I am so sorry guys, I do sincerely apologise to America for us Aussies sending you this nut job Ken Ham in the first place, I am so ashamed to say that he’s from Australia. What a freak, he never could have done what he has done in the States here in Australia, nobody here would stand for it. Sorry.

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