A water park in the heart of the Bible Belt is ending the $5-per-person discount it had been offering on its entrance fee to church groups after the head of a secular charity that caters to inner-city youths requested the same deal for its kids.
The Willow Springs Water Park in Little Rock, Ark., had been knocking a few dollars off the price of admission for people who came to the park with their church group. The entrance fee was lowered 50 percent to $5 for children who came in that context. However, when Leifel Jackson, executive director of Reaching Our Children and Neighborhoods (ROCAN), a secular non-profit that seeks to help inner-city youth, asked if the 35 kids he wanted to bring to the park could get the same discount, he was rebuffed by a park office worker.
Undeterred, Jeff Poleet, a second ROCAN administrator, phoned David Ratliff, Willow Spring Water Park’s owner, to complain about what he felt was a discriminatory practice.
As a result, Ratliff decided to cancel the church-group discounts, rather than give ROCAN the same rebate on the park entrance fee.
Everbody, in effect, was going to have to pay the regular $10 cost for children attending the water park – and no one was going to get the old deal.
But the story doesn’t end there.
The Freedom from Religion Foundation, a national non-profit dedicated to the separation of church-and-state, got wind of what had happened, and a lawyer from the group fired off a letter to Ratliff, informing him that he’d better not reinstitute the discount for church groups in the future, or on a ‘covert’ basis.
This isn’t the first time, of late, that a business has gotten in hot water for offering discounts to faith-based organizations.
Fox News has the full article
