When freshmen first step on campus for orientation, we are taught that the Carolina Creed is like the Force. It surrounds us, binds us and holds our campus together. Nothing emphasized this point more than when President Pastides and Student Body President Lordo made a stand against the racist posters put up on the first day of class, citing the Carolina Creed’s promise to fight discrimination to rousing applause.
However, a recent bill put before the South Carolina House of Representatives next-door at the Statehouse does not fall in step with the principles of USC.
House Bill 4949 is a bill that seeks to redefine marriage in South Carolina. It claims any marriage aside from monogamous, heterosexual marriage is “parody marriage” and should not be recognized by the state. Interestingly enough, all of the bill’s sponsors are white men from red districts in the Upstate, including Representative Rick Martin, who terminated his sponsorship days after the bill was submitted for reasons unknown.
One must wonder how their Republican ally Mark Sandford, who was censured by the House after visiting his mistress in Argentina and still serves as a representative from Charleston, feels about this legislative shaming from his own party.
The bill itself reads like the ramblings of your contrarian uncle over Thanksgiving dinner, calling secular humanism a religion and thereby using the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to protect the state from “parody marriage.” In the ultimate display of a lack of self-awareness, the bill states that marriage between a man and a woman is secular while also defining anything other than heterosexual relationships as failing “to check out the human design,” implicitly suggesting a designer and therefore remaining religious.
It goes on to assert that “civilizations for millennia have defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman." Are we just going to forget how many wives Solomon had according to the Bible? Or in more recent terms, how Mormonism initially advocated for polygamy? Even if the writers of the bill were correct in their assumption, what other things have civilization done for generations that we now recognize as inherently wrong, like slavery or genocide? Should we bring those things back solely on the basis that they have been done for thousands of years?
Several other highlights from this exquisite piece of legislation include the assertion that “parody marriages have never been a part of American tradition and heritage,” which is only factual because the writers of the bill made the concept up themselves.
The bill also makes the reach of equivocating “parody marriage” with the “religion” of secular humanism, again boggling the mind with the idea that a secular ethos is a religion. It goes on to use the association in conjunction with Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), the Supreme Court case that legalized gay marriage, to repeat the tired rhetoric of oppression by a slim minority of people merely trying to attain their own civil rights. The authors of the bill even accuse secular humanists of attempting to infiltrate public schools and indoctrinate children. Overall, the bill presents itself as a condensed version of the arguments against gay marriage from the past few decades.
To be fair, the bill is still stuck in the House Committee on the Judiciary and, even if it escapes that, there is no way it would pass the House. However, the fact that a bill laced with such vile conspiratorial thinking was even introduced by representatives in our state is alarming to say the least.
Even though the representatives that introduced the bill are immune to the votes of a large majority of the USC community, they all maintain Columbia offices with easily found phone numbers and email addresses and the Statehouse is only a short walk away from the Horseshoe. I would like to see a USC that not only holds its own students to the standards of the Carolina Creed, but also positively affects the surrounding community to fight back against these types of sentiments on all fronts.