It's All Happening at the Zoo

When the late great Molly Ivins wrote, "You pick up the paper in the morning and it's kind of like finding Fidel Castro in the refrigerator," she was describing Texas politics. But it works for pretty much anything, such as this item from the Tulsa World:

Republican mayoral candidate Anna Falling said Tuesday that putting a Christian creationism display in the Tulsa Zoo is No. 1 in importance among city issues that also include violent crime, budget woes and bumpy streets. "It's first," she said to calls of "hallelujah" at a rally outside the zoo. "If we can't come to the foundation of faith in this community, those other answers will never come. We need to first of all recognize the fact that God needs to be honored in this city."

The notion of an explicitly Christian creationism exhibit at a zoo (much less a publicly-owned zoo) is sort of like the Pope becoming a Bar Mitzvah - the two just don't go together. It seems Falling has never considered the possibility that people who go to the zoo want to learn about animals and science. People who want to learn about creationism would go to - oh, I don't know - church, maybe.

And Falling apparently doesn't care about what just might take precedence on a mayoral agenda - you know, all that boring secular stuff like budgeting and education and police departments.

But just for the heck of it, what would a creationist zoo exhibit look like? Would we see a mock-up of the Garden of Eden, showing the snake tempting an Eve whose naughty bits are tastefully shielded? Would we have a display showing all the animals which went extinct because they never made it onto the Ark? Perhaps something showing which animals were created on which day. The possibilities are endless.

Falling herself, at least according to her campaign website, appears to be just another generic fundamentalist wacko, charged by God with pushing her personal religious beliefs on everyone else whether we want them or not. Indeed, in her zoo speech she promised to turn city government into a Gilead-ish system of clerical control: "Unless the churches of Tulsa are brought into City Hall to begin to address our community's greatest ills - the City of Tulsa will go bankrupt, spiritually, morally and financially."

The article on the Tulsa World's website has already garnered hundreds of comments, from the aghast ("she's kidding,right? right? please someone tell me she's kidding,right?") to the supportive ("Maybe some need to ask themselves 'why be offended by this honest effort to work on root cause of rot in this city?'") to the puckish ("You can see animals at the Tulsa Zoo performing the acts of creationism most any day of the week!").

Somehow, I think Falling's mayoral campaign is not long for this world. After all, the people of Tulsa see all too well how she's turning their city into a laughingstock. Even if she doesn't.