Creationist-friendly officials in Kentucky are moving forward with plans to grant tax breaks to the ridiculous “Ark Encounter” theme park, thereby ensuring the state’s status as a laughingstock for the entire world, for many years to come.

The six-member board voted unanimously to approve the incentives for the Kentucky Speedway in Gallatin County and to give preliminary approval to the Ark Encounter park in Grant County.

The centerpiece of the Ark Encounter park will be a 500- by-75-foot wooden ark, billed as a replica of the biblical Noah’s Ark. The proposed project has garnered national and international attention, with critics questioning whether granting state tax incentives to the project would violate laws separating church and state.

Ya think? Just because the group behind it is a bunch of unreconstructed creationist fanatics who believe Noah’s Ark actually existed, in the real world, exactly as described in the Bible, let’s not rush to judgment.

Cary Summers, the ark park’s lead consultant, told the board the project is expected to create 900 full- and part-time jobs after its completion and probably will draw 1.6 million visitors a year. Summers said the project is privately funded, and the group does not need a bank loan at this time.

In other words, a dismaying number of people are handing over their hard-earned cash to these charlatans, one way or another.

Summers declined to name the investors. The Answers in Genesis group, which started the Creation Museum that opened in Petersburg in May 2007, will handle daily operations of the park, which will include live and animatronic animals, a replica of the Tower of Babel, an amphitheater and a children’s play area.

Think maybe Answers in Genesis has something to do with the investors Mr. Summers “declined to name?” Nah, couldn’t be. Pay no attention to the huge plug for Ark Encounter on their home page.

Summers said after Monday’s meeting the investors were not connected to a similar biblical-themed park in Tennessee that never materialized.

Those were some other rube-fleecing unnamed hucksters.

Backers of the project say they think the Ark Encounter will be a success in large part because of the Creation Museum’s success. The museum has attracted nearly 1 million visitors since it opened in 2007, officials with Answers in Genesis have said.

Summers said the group’s data show “there is a high, high interest in this subject matter.”

Did I already use the word “dismaying?”

Summers said the group is looking at the possibility of employing Amish carpenters from Kentucky to help build the Ark.

I wonder how many Amish carpenters Noah needed to help build the original Ark?

Oh, that’s right — don’t be silly. There weren’t any Amish people back then. Just goats and chickens and lions and lambs and snails and birds and vegetarian dinosaurs.