Dispatches from the Creation Wars

More details on Hovind’s arrest are found in today’s Pensacola News Journal. I especially love this part:

Of the 58 charges, 44 were filed against Kent Hovind and his wife, Jo, for evading bank reporting requirements as they withdrew $430,500 from AmSouth Bank between July 20, 2001, and Aug. 9, 2002.

At the couple’s first court appearance Thursday before U.S. Magistrate Judge Miles Davis, Kent Hovind professed not to understand why he is being prosecuted. Some 20 supporters were in the courtroom.

“I still don’t understand what I’m being charged for and who is charging me,” he said.

Kent Hovind, who often calls himself “Dr. Dino,” has been sparring with the IRS for at least 17 years on his claims that he is employed by God, receives no income, has no expenses and owns no property.

Hovind knows very well what he’s being charged for and who is charging him. He’s been keeping up this charade for well over a decade now and he can’t be so delusional as to think that it wouldn’t eventually catch up with him. And he not only refuses to pay taxes himself, he also refuses to take any withholding tax from his employees:

In the indictment unsealed Thursday, a grand jury alleges that Kent Hovind failed to pay $473,818 in federal income, Social Security and Medicare taxes on employees at his Creation Science Evangelism/Ministry between March 31, 2001, and Jan. 31, 2004…

The indictment alleges Kent Hovind paid his employees in cash and labeled them “missionaries” to avoid payroll tax and FICA requirements.

Now I’m no fan of the IRS, an agency I would just as soon didn’t exist. But the law is the law and Hovind has been flagrantly violating it for a very long time. The fact that he thinks, or claims to think, that he doesn’t really have to pay taxes doesn’t budge reality any more than his belief that the world is 6000 years old makes it so.

Comments

#1 Skip Evans
July 14, 2006

I’ve been following Hovind since about 1996, and in fact I was the one who got his “dissertation” from Patriot University, and I have a copy now. From a spelling and grammatical perspective, it wouldn’t pass a 7th grade English class. It is full of things like using ‘there’ instead of ‘their’, and it’s for the possessive form. It contains absolutely nothing original, consisting of re-hashed old creationist nonsense, along with his bizarre, esoteric ramblings. It was printed on a dot-matrix printer and had a picture cut out from a magazine taped onto one page. This last bit led me to believe I had the only existing copy, and PU simply mailed it to me when they got my request.

I’ve seen Hovind speak on numerous occasions, and the last time at Berkeley when I challenged his claim, printed in the infamous “Big Daddy” Chick comic tract he helped rewrite, that today nearly all experts believe the australopithecenes were chimpanzees people in the audience shouted at him to “answer the question” as he tried to duck his own lie.

If he ends up in the hoosegow for his crimes, I’ll actually be a bit disappointed. While I do feel justice should be done, his antics have provided us all with years of entertainment. In fact, he is scheduled to speak in Idaho in October, not too far from where I now reside in Montana. I was looking forward to taking a road trip to beautiful Couer d’ Alene to ask him if he ever came up with that list of paleoanthropologists for me.
#2 Dave S.
July 14, 2006

To be fair Skip, Hovind did once say he was continuing to work on his thesis and upgrade it, so maybe you got hold of an earlier edition.
#3 Ed Brayton
July 14, 2006

Skip-

The story of Hovind’s visit to the NCSE office still cracks me up 3 years after you told it to me. I wish there was video of that.
#4 Dave S.
July 14, 2006

Ed –

I am not aware of this visit. What happened?
#5 Ed Brayton
July 14, 2006

I think I’ll let Skip tell the story. Unfortunately, it’s much funnier when you actually know the people involved and can picture the reaction on their faces. Skip is busy right now, but he’ll come back and recount it when he has time.
#6 FM
July 14, 2006

Apparently Hovind skipped the lesson of Jesus in the Gospels to “Render unto Caesar”
#7 Jeremy
July 14, 2006

Awww… he’s busy? Can you just give us a two-sentence outline?

There are pictures of NCSE staffers on the webpage. That might help our understanding.
#8 tubi
July 14, 2006

DaveS says:
“To be fair Skip, Hovind did once say he was continuing to work on his thesis and upgrade it, so maybe you got hold of an earlier edition. ”

Maybe he had to take all the references to ‘creationists’ and replace them with ‘design proponents’.

Also, can someone explain to me how to quote an earlier comment, please?
#9 George Cauldron
July 14, 2006

To be fair Skip, Hovind did once say he was continuing to work on his thesis and upgrade it, so maybe you got hold of an earlier edition. ”

Maybe he had to take all the references to ‘creationists’ and replace them with ‘design proponents’.

Did Hovind ever rebrand himself as an IDer? I dont think he’s ever left straight Biblical Creationism. I doubt his hillbilly audience has any interest in hearing a bunch of big words about any mysterious ‘Designer’.
#10 Ed Brayton
July 14, 2006

Tubi-

To quote a previous comment, you use the blockquote tag. It looks like this:

(blockquote)paste text here(/blockquote)

Replace the ( and ) with angle brackets >
#11 tubi
July 14, 2006

Thanks Ed. It has been a long time since I used HTML and I couldn’t remember the right tags.

And I wasn’t implying Hovind was an IDiot. Just trying to be funny!
#12 Steff Z
July 14, 2006

Hovind in a scum-sucking welfare queen.
He’s horking the money from suckers, instead of from the system.
But it’s the same thing.