A South Carolina lawmaker wants to make sure if his state has an official fossil, God gets credit for creating it.
The lawmaker, state Sen. Kevin Bryant (R), is pushing an amendment that would add language designating a mammoth fossil as the state fossil that reads “as created on the sixth day with the beasts of the field.”
“I just had a notion that we ought to consider acknowledging the creator as we acknowledge one of his creations,” Bryant said according to Reuters.
In a separate interview with The Greenville News Bryant said “I think it’s an appropriate time to acknowledge the creator.”
The original bill was the dream of 8-year-old Olivia McConnell who wrote in a letter to South Carolina lawmakers pointing out that the state has no official fossil. A Democrat in the South Carolina House of Representatives, Robert Ridgeway, sponsored the measure designating a state fossil.
In late March Bryant tried to insert a Bible verse amendment into the legislation. The original amendment, according to the News, quoted a passage from Geneisis: “And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.” But that amendment was cut as it created “new and independent matter.”
Bryant said reactions from some South Carolinians has been “nasty.” One commenter on Bryant’s website, according to Reuters, wrote, “Keep your religious views out of the government.”
Correction: This post originally said the legislation was to designate a woolly mammoth fossil as the state fossil. It is actually a Columbian mammoth fossil.
Photo credit: Wikimedia.
