South Carolina Lawmaker to 8-year-old: God Should Get Credit for the New State Fossil

South Carolina state Senator Kevin Bryant will not be comfortable designating woolly mammoth bone as the state fossil unless God gets a mention. 

The idea for a state fossil was initiated by 8-year-old Olivia McConnell, who wrote a letter to state lawmakers after she found out the state did not have one. South Carolina democratic Representative Robert Ridgeway came up with the legislation, which mostly received bipartisan support.

Except from Bryant. He tried to insert an amendment to remind everybody that the existence of a mammoth contradicts neither the existence of God nor the idea that the Almighty created the Earth in seven days. 

The first amendment he drafted up for the fossil legislation, which was eventually nixed, quoted Genesis directly: "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." 

His new one possesses slightly tempered language: The fossil will be acknowledged "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 to Reuters.

Some South Carolina residents have taken issue with the amendment on social media. 

"Please stop making our state look like backwards hillbillies who believe in fairy tales," Alex Davis commented on Bryant's website. "Keep your religious views out of the government."