8-year-old Olivia McConnell was poring over a restaurant menu that listed all the official symbols of her state when she noticed that South Carolina doesn’t have a state fossil (not counting Strom Thurmond). She did some sleuthing, and the bespeckled third grader wrote a letter to her state legislators, Sen. Kevin Johnson and Rep. Robert Ridgeway, asking them to correct this oversight by designating the Columbian Wooly Mammoth, a huge, shaggy, tusked mammal that roamed northern Europe, Siberia and North American tens of thousands of years ago and became extinct about 4,000 years ago, making a brief reappearance in the 1960’s to act as vacuum cleaners for Wilma Flintstone.
Why the Wooly Mammoth? Olivia laid out her reasons:
1. “One of the first discoveries of a [vertebrate] fossil in North America was on an South Carolina plantation when slaves dug up wooly mammoth teeth from a swamp in 1725”.
and, most adorably:
3. “Fossils tell us about our past.”
“Please work on this for me,” McConnell wrote to Ridgeway, signing her letter, “Your friend, Olivia.”
Democratic Representative Robert Ridgeway received the letter and sponsored the measure.He said he thought it was a great idea, and would help children “realize that they do have a say-so in what happens in South Carolina” and give kids “experience and information about the governmental process and legislative process in South Carolina.”
Which it certainly did.
As it turns out, State Sen. Kevin Bryant is a self-described born-again Christian who voted to sustain a veto by Governor Nikki Haley of funding for a rape crisis center, and called climate change a “hoax”. He got big satirical guffaws back in 2008 with a Facebook post saying
“the difference between Obama and Osama is just a little B.S.”
HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
Sen. Bryant decided to add an amendment to the bill to include three little verses from the Book of Genesis – part of The Bible – detailing God’s creation of the Earth and its living inhabitants — including wooly mammoths. He felt that it was important to explain that God made everything 6000 years ago, because no way did mammoths evolve or stuff.
Here’s the text of the bill that made it official:
Section 1-1-712A. The Columbian Mammoth, which was created on the Sixth Day with the other beasts of the field, is designated as the official State Fossil of South Carolina and must be officially referred to as the ‘Columbian Mammoth’, which was created on the Sixth Day with the other beasts of the field.
This is actually the watered-down version of the bill; one version, proposed earlier, made even more explicit references to the role of a divine creator in the mammoth’s history.
When the amendment was ruled out of order on procedural grounds, because it introduced a new topic, things got even stupider.
Another member of the “science is lies from the pit of hell” caucus, Sen. Mike Fair, whose district includes Bob Jones University, and who is such a committed opponent of children being poisoned by knowledge of evolution that the National Center for Science Education dedicated a webpage to documenting his attempts to block the teaching of science, placed a hold on the state fossil bill.
Unfortunately for Olivia McConnell’s proposal, a bunch of dumb white men with views as dusty as a mammoth’s bones is blocked her move to honor the furry fossil. The bill is stalled, probably permanently, so now Olivia and all the children of South Carolina have learned a whole heck of a lot about how their state government works. Olivia says she’s learning that getting things done requires “time and patience,” which is pretty awesome, because any kid of mine might decide that the real lesson is This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things. And although her friends tell her maybe she should run for Governor someday, Olivia says she wants to be an Egyptologist when she grows up.
According to Bryant, reaction from some South Carolina residents has been “nasty. Someone commented on his website:
“Please stop making our state look like backwards hillbillies who believe in fairy tales. Keep your religious views out of the government.”
Bryant claims that the intent was never to hijack the bill:
“I think it’s a good idea to designate the mammoth as the state fossil, I don’t have a problem with that. I just felt like it’d be a good thing to acknowledge the creator of the fossils.”
Ridgeway said he was surprised at the controversy:
“I was just trying to support a young child who is interested in science. We should support children in any endeavour that they seem interested in. That’s one thing the state should be behind.”
South Carolina. The place where dinosaurs, old people, out-dated notions and kid’s dreams go to die.