Ken Ham files lawsuit against Kentucky

[Esquilax]

Obama lied and said the mandate wasn't a tax and then sent his lawyers before the Supreme Court to argue that the mandate was a tax. People play these games all the time. Courts decide cases on relevant facts....not lies people tell.

I've never understood the christian infatuation with the tu coque fallacy, but one of the relevant facts involved in the case is that Ken Ham initially attempted to skirt the law by hiring people through AiG to work on the Ark Encounter, which demonstrates that A: the official position of the plaintiff is not what they actually believe, and B: that the plaintiff attempted to gain access to a government program designed to incentivise tourism through deceptive means. Courts don't take well to perjury, I've heard.

Another relevant fact is that the Ark Encounter was sold to the Kentucky government as a theme park, and totally not as a religious deal, in order to make it seem like a better draw for tourism dollars; if Ham wants to turn around and now say that the Ark Encounter totally is a religious thing, then I'd say he applied for the program under false pretenses, and at the very least he should have to re-apply under the terms he now finds it convenient to follow, which Ham was aware from the beginning would drastically lower the chances of getting approved for the program simply on the basis of the numbers.

These are all extremely relevant to the case; the reason Ham was denied in the first place was that he and his organization were not comporting themselves with state expectations regarding eligibility to the program. The fact that Ham has continued to engage in the behaviors that got him kicked from the program in the first place, both during the investigation regarding that and in response to it, only lends strength to the case that the state had when it rejected his application.

Don't get me wrong, I hope Ham wins his suit....but I hope he wins it because I don't like discrimination laws. People should have the freedom to discriminate in my opinion....but that is a another subject entirely.

Ham has the freedom to discriminate; he just doesn't have the right to be rewarded by the state for doing so. And leaving aside the breathtaking entitlement of demanding that you have the right to be given special treatment at will, I do wonder whether you, Heywood, would be making this argument if the discrimination was against a christian, rather than committed by one.

In fact, this exact case kinda is discrimination against christians; young earth creationism is a small, small fraction of christianity as a whole, yet the job requirements for the Ark Encounter require an affirmation of young earth creationist christianity, not just christianity as a whole. One wonders how Ham can argue that his park is a christian organization, while simultaneously discriminating against more than half of that religion.