The National Park Service won the hearts of libtards everywhere earlier this year when it pointed out the size of Donald Trump’s inauguration crowds relative to Barack Obama’s. This hit Trump in a sensitive enough place (wink) that he lashed out by temporarily shutting down the Park Service’s Twitter account. But the move backfired when park rangers, a group of people who voluntarily live and work in the wilderness and don’t like being told what to do, started making rogue Twitter accounts critical of the administration. Things have been relatively quiet since then, but never fear—our nations’ parks continue to be run by badasses.
Enter Andrew A. Snelling, a man who The New York Times refers to as a “creationist” and Fox News as a “Christian geologist.” Snelling—who has a doctorate in geology from the University of Sydney in his native Australia—believes in a literal interpretation of Genesis, meaning that, in his mind, not only is the Earth less than 10,000 years old, it was created in six days. He works for Answers in Genesis, the Kentucky-based nonprofit behind the Creation Museum, and gives river rafting tours of the Grand Canyon to well-heeled fundamentalists where he explains that the Grand Canyon was not formed by the slow trickle of water over millennia, as “secular” scientists claim, but by one big old powerful gush of water—you guessed it, Noah’s flood.
It was for one of those trips that he applied to collect about 60 half-pound rocks from the Grand Canyon for unspecified purposes back in November 2013, according to the Phoenix New Times. That request was sent to the University of New Mexico’s Dr. Karl Karlstrom—who recently made headlines with his discovery that the Grand Canyon is a relatively young six million years old—for review. Long story short, Karlstrom was like, “lol this guy,” and Grand Canyon National Park was like “right?,” and Snelling’s application was denied by the NPS in March 2014 with a warning that if he collected rocks anyway, he’d be banned from the park.
Snelling re-submitted his proposal the following year, and was given permission to take pictures in the park, but not to collect samples. Now, he’s enlisted Arizona-based Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom to sue Grand Canyon National Park, the National Park Service, and the Department of the Interior, alleging bias against his research simply because it has nothing to back it up. As the NYT puts it, the lawsuit claims ”officials subjected [Snelling] to cumbersome requirements, such as providing coordinates and photographs of each of the places from which he planned to collect rocks and submitting his proposal to peer reviews.” (You know, science.) And he may actually have a case, given President Trump’s recent executive order protecting peoples’ religious liberty to not only believe unsubstantiated nonsense, but to act on those beliefs.