If you’re a dino hunter in North America, it’s hard to find a better place to dig than Montana. It’s known officially as the Treasure State, and the fossils found there are treasures indeed. These days, Montana is at the upper end of part of the high western desert. It is semi-arid, land-locked, sparsely populated, and gorgeous. But 100 million years ago, much of the state was submerged below warm, shallow seas and laced in lush, swampy coastlines. These were perfect prehistoric conditions for Jurassic and Cretaceous animals and plants to thrive, and the region would then transform into a perfect environment to create and preserve fossils of many of those impressive creatures.
Montana is world-renowned for fossils of all kinds. Formations with legendary names exist in the literature starting at the dawn of the modern paleo-biology page. Some of the first and most iconic fossils, including some of the earliest T-rex remains ever found and classified, came from the Montanan side of the famous Hellcreek Formation in the early part of the 20th century. Practically the entire state has been a hotbed of fossil delights ever since. If any one state should be proud of the contribution it has made to the study of natural history and evolutionary biology, it is Montana.
Naturally, there’s always some clown bucking the trend. In this case it’s a Montana politician playing the creationist card. Greg Gianforte is the Republican nominee for the state’s open seat in the House of Representatives. He says he’s not sure if he accepts evolution; no one can get a straight answer on how old he thinks the state and the rest of the world are; he claims he’s already answered the question whenever it is raised, etc., ad nauseam. It’s classic conservative evasiveness, that standard operating procedure.
There’s a whole new generation of netroots activists that probably hadn’t become fully politically aware years ago, during the darkest days of the Bush administration. But whatever differences you had with him, George W. Bush was by all accounts no faker when it came to religion. He is a genuine evangelical born-again Christian. He may not have been a Young Earth Creationist himself, but his sympathy for them was probably legitimate and paved with good intentions. Perhaps the same can be said for Gianforte.
Bush’s empathy for and the rise of the hardcore religious is the reason we saw a big uptick in officials professing creationism and politicians seeking to sneak it into K-12 science classes back in the early 2000s. We had a regular weekend series here at Daily Kos to combat the misinformation titled “Know Your Creationists,” and the whole thing finally culminated—or blew up, from the perspective of creationist-friendly sources—in the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case that put a spike through the heart of that particular conservative zombie.
Judging by actions since then, most conservatives would just as soon let sleeping zombies lie (ha!). After all, there are far more important, i.e., profitable, forms of science denial awaiting their turn in the conservative black bag of tools and tricks. That’s especially true of climate change denial. We’re talking oil money, Jethro—black-gold, Texas tea, really serious money, giga-dollars by the giga-barrel. But in Montana, zillionaire industrialist Greg Gianforte went ahead and stirred the creationist pot and produced, predictably, a bit of a tempest.
There are a lot of good reasons to keep this guy out of office beyond his mistaken, or craven, views on natural history. More than anything else those are just sad, as Gianforte could have been a great, positive force for science in the region. He is an accomplished engineer and highly successful entrepreneur. But instead, he chose to adopt a full-blown fundamentalist position so extreme that he opposes Social Security based on zany notions about Noah and others working when they were 600 years old, and claims that retirement is against the Good Book. You can imagine how he feels about marriage equality, healthcare, or tax cuts for zillionaires.
The Gianforte Family Foundation also spearheaded the funding of a most unusual dinosaur museum in Glendive, Montana, described here by the National Center for Science Education:
Entering the museum, visitors walk over models of the sea floor, which claim that life “couldn’t have evolved or developed by chance” … The answers to these and other questions are on the museum’s second — and most entertainingly depressing — floor, which rings the main exhibits like a gallery. Atop the stairs is the usual “here’s why evolution is a lie” … Each exhibit claims to prove evolution is a conspiracy perpetuated by scientists, and in the adjacent theater, you can watch movies such as “Incredible Creatures that Defy Evolution” and “The Faith Behind the Science.”
Young Earth Creationism may seem like an almost adorable indulgence perpetuated by a few lovable eccentrics, especially in light of the wholesale rejection of documented facts practiced by today’s conservatives in the form of the ruling Trump family. But it conceals a number of often bizarre and outright harmful beliefs. It promotes contempt for knowledge in general, and public education specifically. It undermines the science our civilization runs on—particularly biology, to its very foundation. And in someone with a solid science education like Gianforte, it denotes either poor judgement or craven opportunism in which facts and observations are subordinate to personal whims and political convenience.
In short, Gianforte is the kind of guy that can needlessly turn an entire state into a running joke. Montana is huge and exquisitely beautiful, and still so sparsely populated that it has twice as many U.S. senators as congressmen: the Treasure State gets two senators, but only one member in the U.S. House of Representatives!
Given those stakes, Montanans can surely do better than Greg Gianforte.