I was going to snark away at the economics of this — I mean, how can you not? After all, here’s a solid Red State, supposedly home of fiscally conservative tea-bagging patriot who are all for free market economy (albeit with an old-school southern D at the helm — which I guess is basically a Republican who just can’t read), a state that has seen repeated budget cuts three years in a row and isn’t exactly flush with spending cash. And yet, that same state is happily forking over millions and millions of dollars in tax breaks and incentives to get the ultimate Xtian Theme Park to set up shop in their backwaters of the nation.
I was going to poke fun of the hypocrisy of the state bending over backwards to lose money in perpetuity just to get this thing to happen, but I’ll leave that to others who do it better. Instead, I’m going to argue that as a hardcore atheist I find the whole idea of an Xtian Theme Park awesome. It puts the entire bible schtick perfectly on a par with Disney and Universal Studios, those creators of wonderful fiction and fantasy, universes wholly fabricated by collective imaginations and populated with characters and plot lines, morals and universes that are not and never were really “real.” You know, like most of the Bible.
So, by all means, let Kentucky spend money they don’t have to get this monument to collective stupidity (a scary, scary number of Americans apparently buy the whole package of “the Word of God” and the grotesque rules and failed morals described within), let them have their fake Ark complete with dinosaurs (really? I mean, really?) and then let the faithful gullible make pilgrimages there to marvel at their self-deceipt and worship a styrofoam rendition of their moral crutch.
And let the rest of us then point out that what they’re doing is no different than going to Orlando — and that the faith with which they continue to ruin the lives of so many by shoving it down our collective throat is therefore no different than that of an eight-year old who fervently believes in the tooth fairy, wants to be a mermaid when she grows up, and also wants to marry Peter Pan and be a unicorn on the weekend. It’s. No. Different. And it should not be allowed to determine who gets to marry who and how we all get to live our lives.
