By Andy Brack | The silly season in South Carolina is about to start. Yep, it’s an election year and the legislature is headed back into session in a few days filled with culture wars to fight.
Good gracious, it would be just plain refreshing if they would debate real policy issues that mattered instead of trying to tell people what to do with their bodies. Legislative nannies were supposed to get that out of their system last year when they banned abortions after a “fetal heartbeat” is detected. The decision, upheld by the courts, essentially curtails abortions after about six weeks, which is when some women don’t even realize they’re pregnant.
But now comes 2024 and the culture warriors have to make another divisive and fear-mongering stand to whip up red-meat voters to prove they’re more conservative than the even more conservative nutcase who wants to run against them.
So what do we get? More nannying.
One bill filed in November, for example, seeks to keep 16- and 17-year-olds from deciding whether they want nonsurgical medical care, such as prescription treatment for birth control or sexually transmitted diseases (STD), without permission of their parents or guardians.
The proposal, cooked up by S.C. Sens. Michael Johnson, R-York, and Josh Kimbrell, R-Spartanburg, assumes teen-agers don’t have the mental capacity to make decisions about their health – which is ludicrous. What teen-ager with an STD is going to want mommy and daddy to find out about it? The kid is going to want to handle it in consultation with a doctor – just like women who found themselves pregnant wanted to make a decision with their doctor instead of having the heavy hand of the state butt in and tell them what they could or couldn’t do with their bodies.
So here we go again, with two South Carolina men with power who want to control people’s bodies. It’s pretty clear already this bill filled with unintended consequences is going to face a firestorm from the six women in the chamber (Five won a national award for legislative courage last year for standing up for women during a grueling abortion debate. Just this week, former Columbia city council member Tameika Isaac Devine won a special election to become the sixth woman among 46 state senators.}
State Sen. Sandy Senn, R-Charleston, says the sponsors of the nanny bill so far have refused to exclude 16- and 17-year-old girls from its negative impacts.
“We all want to keep our girls little forever and have them practice abstinence,” she told Statehouse Report. “But like it or not, they grow up and the choice is theirs.
“Keeping 16- and 17-year-old girls away from birth control when they have privately told their doctors that they want to be on it is a tactic that will not age well. And with South Carolina being the number three state in the nation for highest rates of STDs, do lawmakers really want our older teens to suffer from an STD, untreated, and spread it around all because the legislature has mandated that doctors and pharmacists tell their daddies on them?”
In other words, male state lawmakers need to grow up and stop using the heavy hand of government (we thought they wanted the government out of our lives) to fight their politically expedient culture wars. If you want to be nannies, how about doing something about the gun violence that’s killing way too many people across the state, instead of taking a pass year after year on reasonable measures like closing the Charleston gun loophole or universal background checks.
The nanny bill by Johnson and Kimbrell isn’t the only thing teed up to keep the culture wars alive this year. According to The State newspaper, at least nine bills were pre-filed in the S.C. House related to gender – gender transition, gender care, gender-assigned bathrooms and other issues related to the LGBTQ community. Geez, it would be great if they could have some consistency in how they treat people – like, maybe, leaving people alone.
The 2024 session gets underway at noon on Tuesday. Lord, grant us peace.
Andy Brack is editor and publisher of Statehouse Report and the Charleston City Paper. Have a comment? Send to: feedback@statehousereport.com.
We Can Do Better, South Carolina!
Isn’t it funny that back when Democrats were trying to pass the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), Republicans were outraged, falsely accusing Obama of trying to give the government control over our medical care? Actually, no, it’s not funny at all.
Legislators need to learn appropriate uses of their power to govern — to make the lives of South Carolinians better — and not to function as the morality police, for which they are famously unqualified.