Because Fort Sumter wasn’t so very long ago:
(Reuters) – An 8-year-old South Carolina girl’s dream of having the woolly mammoth become the official state fossil has been put on hold while lawmakers debate an amendment that gives God credit for creation of the prehistoric animal.
A bill that recently passed the state House to designate the Columbian Mammoth as the state fossil stalled in the Senate after Republican Senator Kevin Bryant added two verses from the book of Genesis.
That amendment was ruled out of order but senators this week will debate a new amendment that says the mammoth was “created on the sixth day along with the beasts of the field,” Bryant said on Monday.
“I just had a notion that we ought to consider acknowledging the creator as we acknowledge one of his creations,” Bryant said.
The original measure followed a letter to elected officials by Olivia McConnell, an-8-year-old from New Zion, South Carolina.
In it, she pointed out that there is no state fossil, said Democratic Representative Robert Ridgeway, who received the letter and sponsored the measure.
McConnell suggested the elephant-like mammoth because an early find of its remains took place in 1725 on a South Carolina plantation where slaves dug up a tooth, Ridgeway said.
Folks down there should probably go ahead and reelect Sens. Tim Scott and Lindsey Graham, because they’re beyond hope.
Kevin Bryant is the state fossil.
“We’ve been misunderstood,” Bryant didn’t say. “It wasn’t that we disapproved of the bill as such, it’s just that it didn’t violate the Establishment Clause, so we had to fix that. We didn’t want to miss an opportunity to spit on the Constitution.”
This shit makes my head ache. Just this morning in our local newspaper, there were four letters to the editor about teaching Creationism in public schools, and three of them were insisting that we should. After all, if we teach the ” theory” of evolution, than certainly the Creation deserves equal time. The fourth letter suggested that all Creation theories be taught.
For all the heralding of the Constitution the Right likes to do, they conveniently ignore the separation of Church and State. According to one of the letter writers, Washington DC is full of buildings that point to God the Almighty, like the Washington Monument, and that our country was founded on Christian beliefs.
The sad fact is, these people will never change. The more power they get, the more TeaParty nuts who get into office, the greater the risk of losing key laws that keep church out of government and schools. And to take that further, the rights of women to have access to contraception and abortion.
The Right often likens issues to a “slippery slope”. Well, if you ask me, overturning laws and writing amendments to include religious beliefs like Creationism is putting us on one very slippery slope. I don’t want to be hanging on the edge of it.
the idiocy continues.
I may be in the minority, but I’m relatively happy that we won the Civil War – these fleas come with the dog.
That dog needs flea powder.
I agree. It’s not as if the United States and the CSA could have lived side by side in peace. The slave power was always an expansionist power, because they always wanted to grab more land for their plantations.
Of course they would have started by expanding to the south, into Mexico and the Caribbean. So in addition to the constant friction between us and them, letting them go would have been a horribly rude thing to do to our neighbors to the south.
I was rather shocked reading “Battle Cry of Freedom” lately at how much effort slave interests put into expanding into Mexico, Cuba, Nicaragua and other places. I had never understood how pervasive those movements were.
William Walker in Nicaragua:
Why wouldn’t we have also been battling the Slave Power in the American West? Just because they were nominally US territories?
Oh, I’m sure we would have. I was thinking of Mexico because this was when Napoleon III took advantage of our Civil War to go into Mexico and install Maximilian as his puppet emperor. The French couldn’t really hold Mexico on their own, so Maximilian was doomed once the US was no longer distracted by the war. But if the Confederacy had been successful, they and Napoleon could have carved up Mexico between them.
I’m glad we won too. I just regret, more everyday, allowing them back.
I’m surely in the minority that would have preferred winning it decisively by leaving Sherman in command of the South (and leaving the Native Americans alone) and awarding financial reparations to every emancipated slave.
That was the time to do it, when the directly harmed were alive to collect.
The American Taliban aren’t ever going to quit. At first pass, the rational beings among us might think that something as innocuous as supporting an 8 year old’s (and other kid’s) love of science and fossils by this bill could glide right through.
But you see, the evangelist-libertarian-congressional complex can’t afford to let other 8 year olds be inspired by their curiosity, their love of science or for that matter their knowledge about anything beyond the narrow scope of “bible school”. Open minds must be quashed. The purity of the evangelical cult must be maintained.
And besides Bryant “told The State he believes the amendment does not violate the First Amendment because it is from the Old Testament, which multiple religions adhere to.”
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/04/01/mammoth-bible-south-carolina-state-fossil/
Constitution, Schmonstitution…
At least he acknowledges the First Amendment, even if he doesn’t appear to understand it. Among a lot of fundies, it’s an article of faith – pun intended – that there’s never been any such thing as separation of church and state in the Constitution, that that’s just another lie promoted by godless atheistic lib’ruls.
Unfortunately, even in the most primitive of these states – and South Carolina is a top contender for the honor – a lot of good people live, and their lives are made immeasurably worse by the morons their neighbors keep electing. I feel badly for them.
I think it is quite possible he understands the First Amendment but feels compelled to play to his constituency.
Another key aspect missing from Bryant’s stated view though is that he doesn’t speak for the many faiths that rely on this biblical content. And most Christians disagree with his own personal interpretation (which he leaves a little vague). Bryant’s meddling is obnoxious to both sides of the State and Church seperation.
I also feel badly for these SCers. But I also hope that many of them are starting to see more clearly how voting matters – now more than ever. It won’t be this issue that wakes up the unmotivated. But ACA might. If the seed of doubt is created that Obamacare is NOT the godless, socialist abomination their pols and preachers claim it to be… Well, here’s an interesting stat from Kos this AM about a different state:
Yes, indeed, if two faiths espouse a similar doctrine, then the doctrine CAN’T be an “establishment of religion”! That’s obvious.
Look for this kind of illiterate “interpretation” in Scalia’s next opinion. Also, too, Broccoli!
Who manufactures this shit for the Bryants of Conserva-dom?
I thought the legislature designated Strom Thurmond as the state fossil before he died. What an oversight.
This creationism trend in South Carolina is reflective of the national trend promoted by entrepreneurial TV preachers and entrepreneurial evangelical universities (Bob Jones, Liberty, Regent).
It also turns out to be something that South Carolinians themselves laugh at as being from crazy legislators doing useless things. Who needs a state fossil? Why the religious distraction? Oh, the fundies again. But do not punish their legislators for doing this sort of pandering to the preachers who organize their GOTV campaigns. And do not understand how these preachers’ dogmatic doctrinal special pleading is different for Moral Monday’s campaigns for social justice based on a Christian tradition of justice.
And it’s ironic in that a Southern Baptist friend of mine and I found our first fossils (shells, shark’s teeth) when we were 10 and there was no religious hullabaloo about Darwin at all. In the 1950s, and everyone loved Spencer Tracy in Inherit the Wind when it came out. The politicians in the South Carolina of Governor George Bell Timmerman and Governor Fritz Hollings saw itself as “progressive” innovating in community colleges, technical education, and educational television, and keeping up with science. The politicians preached that “progressive” message to constituents at picnics, barbecues, and service club meetings. And the post-Sputnik emphasis on science allowed teachers in South Carolina high schools to teach the theory of evolution thorough to those who taught high school biology (and often moved elsewhere). This is a throwback engineered by Jesse Helms of North Carolina and given national force by Ronald Reagan.
I hope the 8-year-old persists and shames the legislature.
No, just never fought it: should have spent money on a federal underground railroad and human rights enforcement in the North.
Ha-ha, now the “conservative” paralysis has expanded to include merely ceremonial legislation! Every piece of legislation must be reactionary or no dice! That’s “conservatism”!
As Tarheel points out, this sort of pandering by elected officials to religious medievalism is a relatively new phenomenon in America, tracing back to Reagan and his catering to the Moral Majority honchos. Political leaders of 50 years ago wouldn’t cotton to this braindead crap, which would have been seen as embracing abject ignorance. Now the Repub party demands gub’mint kneel at the altar.
One has to wonder what even a committed fundamentalist thinks is to be gained by shouting “Creationism!” at the top of their lungs. No biologist will change their mind on evolution because “creationism”. No non-religious school or college will change its curriculum. No state (or nation) not dominated by Christian fundamentalists will alter their educational stance. Biological science will pay no heed to the medievalists and will continue to progress, even if all of Idiot America “teaches” Creationism.
I guess it all boils down to making sure that the unfortunate kids (fundamentalist or no) are forced to eat the pastors’ medieval shit as long as possible in the hope that some of them come to like the flavor of being a rube and a simpleton, because Jeebus smiles when you have the faith (i.e. mind) of a child, apparently. More likely, Jeebus wept…
The fly in the ointment is that public school text publishers have to cater to this backward shit when large states like Tex-ass demand it. Perhaps there should simple be a “Blue” and a “Gray” edition of each textbook, in honor of the return of the Civil War, ha-ha. And according to the 5 conservative male activists masquerading as “justices”, states rights now trump constitutional rights, meaning the Confederacy ultimately won, it just took another 150 years!
Funny how states’ rights only trump federal legislation when the states want to be reactionary and ignorant. When a state wants to be more progressive – in gay marriage, say, or a carbon tax – that argument magically disappears, and instead the Cretin Lobby demands that the feds Do Something to rein in those evil, evil states.
Wonder which state will be last to end marijuana prohibition? Local option for prohibition of alcohol still exists in a few states, and there are still a few counties in each of those states that are holding the fort and arresting “drunk” drivers at the county line to gain revenue.
And on the 7th Day, He rested, and idiots like Bryant found there way into the world when He wasn’t looking.
Escaping Bryant entirely is that the 6th day would need to be millions of years long to include all beasts of the field.
.
This stuff won’t end until evangelists who are tired of getting tarred by the same brush that smacks people like Bryant get off their asses and take back their public image from the blowhards.
And yes, they do exist – their numbers may not be growing as quickly as they could, sadly, but this seems very much like a tipping point situation. It might be hard to see the end coming until it arrives, but it is coming.
This is just another conservative Pyrrhic victory.
Rejoice, one and all!