This dear readers is the proverbial casebook example as to why the Tea Party needs not only to be defeated, but defeated so brutally that they think twice and think hard about ever again attempting to hijack the American political apparatus for their own ideological gain:
When eight-year-old Olivia McConnell was perusing a menu at a restaurant that features all 50 of the official symbols of her home state of South Carolina, she noticed a glaring vacancy. South Carolina has a State American Folk Dance, a State Grass, a State Opera, even a State Lowcountry Handcraft, but—no offense to square dancing, Indian grass, Porgy and Bess, or sweet grass baskets intended—McConnell thought something was missing: a state fossil.
The third grader at Carolina Academy wrote a letter to her state lawmakers, Rep. Robert Ridgeway and Sen. Kevin Johnson, in a bid to give the woolly mammoth that honor. Olivia has sound reasons behind her nomination: One of the first discoveries of a fossil in North America was that of a woolly mammoth’s teeth, dug up by slaves on a South Carolina plantation in 1725; all but seven states have an official state fossil; and, most adorably, “Fossils tell us about our past.
Unfortunately for McConnell’s proposal, a pair of state senators with views as dusty as a mammoth’s bones is blocking her move to honor the furry fossil.
After Ridgeway and Johnson introduced a bill to amend the state’s code to include the Columbian Mammoth as the official state fossil of South Carolina, the state House passed it 94-3. The state Senate hasn’t been so accommodating.
Sen. Kevin Bryant, a pharmacist and self-described born-again Christian who has compared President Obama with Osama bin Laden, voted to sustain a veto by Governor Nikki Haley of funding for a rape crisis center, and called climate change a “hoax,” proposed amending the bill to include three verses from the Book of Genesis detailing God’s creation of the Earth and its living inhabitants—including mammoths.http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/south-carolina-lawmaker-8-year-old-god-should-get-credit-new-state-fossil
So to summarize, an innocent, smart, well intentioned, 8-year old girl with a laudable interest in science and paleontology, decides to engage her political representatives and submit a request to have her home state of South Carolina, like 40 some other states, designate a state fossil.
Sounds inoffensive and sufficiently apolitical enough right? Just an elementary school kid with an affinity for fossils wanting to see their hobby receive some recognition. It's not infringing upon anyone's rights or freedoms or religious proclivities.
Apparently not so if you're a religious fundamentalist Teabagger.
Even after a clear majority in the SC House voted 94-3 to pass the state fossil resolution, SC Senate Teanut representative Kevin Bryant blocked the bill from moving forward unless his demand that wording be inserted in to the bill which basically consisted of word-for-word bible verses detailing the creation story in the book of Genesis.
This dear readers is precisely the very same mindset that the Taliban -- you know, those creepy, extremist, stone-age thinking religious fanatics who we have been fighting and killing and dying at the hands of over in Afghanistan for a decade -- possess. They truly are one and the same. The only difference being that our home-grown American Taliban are roaming the halls of our state and national governments.
The Gadfly has said it repeatedly and will state it once again -- Americans of sound mind and manner ignore these lunatics at the peril of our democracy's future existence.
----TFG
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