Friday, December 17, 2010
If you are interested
The Wall Street Journal takes a look at the proposed Ark Encounter that is being built by Answers in Genesis as a Noah's Ark themed amusement park/tourist attraction. The whole effort is creating something of a stir because Kentucky is offering some substantial tax breaks to the project, which has some crying foul over church-state issues. I understand why Kentucky is interested in giving them tax breaks as this park promises to draw large crowds who will bring lots of tourism money to northern Kentucky and likely keep people visiting the Creation Museum in the state a few days longer. It is an interesting article if you have a few spare minutes.
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I would think the fact that Ark Encounters LLC is a for-profit company that will pay any applicable taxes, and that these tax incentives are future sales tax rebates rather than any kind of direct funding, would remove most "separation of church and state" arguments. Although, folks who gripe about church organizations not paying taxes rarely recognize any other 501C3 entities as sharing this trait.
McClay hints around that Ark Encounters is "more commercial", but fails to point out the key differences in the LLC from a religious, non-profit organization (or "faith-based" organizations as his rabbit trail described). Looking at the comments section, his ambiguity worked well.
After corporate welfare failures in TN such as Saturn, Dell and Memphis Biofuels (and we just handed out some more to Volkswagen & Wacker-Chemie,) where direct funding (in one case $200,000 per alleged job to be created), land and interstate exits got thrown in, only taking a cut on the future sales tax "profits" seems pretty tame. Since McClay at UTC is about 20 miles away from the latest two, I am sure he is aware of this.
I did like his comment:
"But it is also possible that there is no way for Ark Encounter to bring the Bible to life without demeaning or cheapening the very things it is intending to exalt."
Although, I have no idea what the "proper separation of faith and commerce" is. Just weights and measures?
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