4.24 Thursday (Apotheosis of St. Cunagunda)

If only to feed my penchant for gentle raillery, our great states of Dixie have once again hoisted the banner of evangelical fervor on a truly African scale. Two recent instances of legislative zeal, the first from South Carolina, where a legislative amendment has been proposed to another bill that recently passed the state House to designate the Columbian mammoth as the state fossil. The initial bill is stalled after Republican senator Kevin Bryant added two verses from the book of Genesis. (That would be the Republican senator Kevin Bryant who posted the now famous Osama/Obama photo on his campaign website a few years back.)  

Bryant's amendment was ruled out of order, but senators rallied to debate his addendum to the bill, which adds to the original text that the mammoth was "created on the sixth day along with the beasts of the field." (Which would include dinosaurs.)

The original measure came in response to a letter to elected officials from Olivia McConnell, an-8-year-old resident, who pointed out that there is as yet no South Carolina state fossil. Funny, I always thought the state fossil was Strom Thurmond.

The great state of Mississippi, much to the premature delight of a few enlightened teachers and parents who should have seen this coming, mandated that schools now must provide a state-wide curriculum of sex education. As it happens, the state commissariat of education was neither interested in sex nor in education. A central prop in the standardized instruction is a Peppermint Pattie, which is unwrapped and handed about the room until everyone has handled it, whereupon it is displayed to a horrified classroom in all its sweatyfingered, deliquescent moral torpor. "They're using [it] to show that a girl is no longer clean or valuable after she's had sex — that she's been used," explained an outraged parent who is also a public health worker.

No shame

I wonder what the Africans are up to these days.