Tag: State House

Categories
Community Legislation

P&C: SC House panel shelves bill to ban transgender athletes from girls’ sports

COLUMBIA — A S.C. House panel shelved a GOP-led proposal on March 16 that would prevent participation in girls’ middle and high school sports by transgender athletes, with one Republican calling it deceptively worded.

Known as the “Save Women’s Sport Act,” the measure raised concerns among opponents that such a move would be unconstitutional and marginalize the state’s LGBTQ population.

Despite support from the influential S.C. Family Caucus, H. 3477 was tabled by the House Judiciary Committee.

S.C. Rep. Micah Caskey, R-West Columbia, told The Post and Courier he voted to shelve the bill because he thought its definition of gender was too simplistic and failed to take into account science used by sports organizations to determine eligibility.

He also was worried over lost economic opportunities if the bill passed, a concern raised by some Republicans in 2016 when lawmakers considered a proposal to restrict public bathroom use by transgender people.

While the bill’s chances in the House are dwindling, a companion bill awaits in the Senate.

Twice in the past five years, waivers have been granted in South Carolina to transgender women seeking spots on a girls’ team, South Carolina High School Sports League officials have said. None have been issued for transgender men, though two such requests have been made.

Similar legislation has been introduced in conservative-majority statehouses around the nation, where it has run into legal challenges and civil rights complaints. In August 2020, a federal judge ruled that transgender women and girls in Idaho can’t be barred from competing in sports based on their gender identity, overruling that state’s Legislature.

Ivy Hill, program director of the Campaign for Southern Equality, said the bill sent a “poisonous message across the state.”

“Our collective message today was a powerful reminder to trans youth. That they are loved, cared for and supported,” Hill said in a statement.

Caskey, the only South Carolina lawmaker on the committee who spoke ahead of the March 16 vote, said he received word of a screening video sent to the Charleston Visitors Bureau from USA Weightlifting. One of its requirements is if potential host sites have discriminatory practices, Caskey told The Post and Courier following the vote.

“Ultimately, if we’re going to go down this road and do this sort of thing, I don’t know why we wouldn’t adopt scientifically-based protocols that have been established by the NCAA and International Olympic Committee,” Caskey said. Both those organizations have guidelines to allow for transgender competition.

Among opponents to her bill was S.C. Superintendent of Education Molly Spearman, who made a surprise appearance at a subcommittee hearing earlier this month to lobby against it.

“I know how important athletics is to what we’re trying to do in our public schools across South Carolina,” Spearman said March 3. “My responsibility as state superintendent is to make sure every child feels protected when they are in school and when they are on the athletic field, and I believe this bill does damage to that.”

State Rep. John McCravy, a Greenwood Republican who chairs the Family Caucus, said House lawmakers will re-file the bill next session.

“We will come back with this bill, because it’s what our constituents in South Carolina want us to do,” McCravy told The Post and Courier.

Bill sponsor Pelzer Republican Ashley Trantham added after the hearing, “This isn’t the first time women have had to fight for equality. Today’s defeat was just the beginning of a bigger battle that will be won.”

Still, an identical bill to Trantham’s, sponsored by state Sen. Richard Cash, R-Anderson, is awaiting action by the Senate Education Committee.

Roughly 3 percent of all South Carolina adults are LGBTQ though just how many are transgender is unknown, but a 2019 U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey showed that 2 percent of school students identify as transgender.

Categories
Legislation

P&C: Conservative lawmakers seek to ensure SC churches stay open during future emergencies

COLUMBIA, S.C. — After watching more liberal states shut down or limit religious gatherings in an attempt to slow the spread of the coronavirus, a group of conservative state lawmakers is seeking to ensure that South Carolina will never be able to to take similar action if another pandemic arises in the future.

A new bill would add to South Carolina’s already existing Religious Freedom Act by formally classifying religious services as essential during states of emergency, saying they are “considered necessary and vital to the health and welfare of the public.”

That means churches or other houses of worship could not face more stringent restrictions than any other services considered essential.

The effort is an attempt to prevent South Carolina from following in the footsteps of states like California and New York, which sought to ban religious gatherings in an attempt to stem the spread of COVID-19.

But that issue never arose in South Carolina. Republican Gov. Henry McMaster steadfastly refused to restrict religious services, saying he could not trample on their First Amendment rights.

State Rep. Richie Yow, the lead sponsor of the bill that has 25 GOP co-sponsors, told a House subcommittee on Feb. 16 that South Carolina’s decision to let churches stay open through this pandemic does not mean it could attempt a different approach in the future.

Yow, R-Chesterfield, said he had been questioned whether South Carolina had ever shut down churches.

“I said, ‘No, but we’re not guaranteed the answer for tomorrow,’ ” he said.

The subcommittee voted 4-0 in favor of the bill, H.3105, sending it to the full committee for the next step. Already two dozen other House members, mostly Republicans from the Upstate, have signed on as co-sponsors.

South Carolina was among 15 states that never impeded religious gatherings. According to the Pew Research Center, 10 states banned services completely due to COVID-19. Other states, including North Carolina, limited gatherings to 10 people or fewer.

While the U.S. Supreme Court initially rejected a California church’s attempt to overturn that state’s restrictions on in-person religious services, it later ruled against the restrictions in that state and several others.

State Rep. Jason Elliott, R-Greenville, said he does not foresee church closures becoming an issue in South Carolina.

“But if you were in one of those (other) states at different times, you might not have foreseen that your religious rights would be violated in those states,” Elliott said. “So I appreciate this and I plan to support it.”

Five members of the public, including multiple pastors around South Carolina, testified in favor of the bill; none spoke against it.

State Rep. Spencer Wetmore, D-Charleston, asked some speakers at the hearing why the bill is necessary, pointing to the Supreme Court’s recent rulings on the issue.

“Despite the fact that there are protections for the exercise of religion, the unfortunate fact remains that laws are occasionally passed that do violate those rights, and this is necessary to ensure that the state will not take those measures,” responded Greg Chaufen, legal counsel at the Alliance for Defending Freedom.

Wetmore ended up voting in favor of the bill.

Categories
Legislation

P&C: Critics of SC abortion ban prepare for legal fight as bill nears final passage

COLUMBIA, S.C. — A bill to ban most abortions in South Carolina took yet another step closer to passage on Feb. 9, advancing out of a House committee on party lines to set up one final debate on the House floor before the Republican majority almost certainly approves it. 

After around 2.5 hours of debate, mostly featuring lengthy denunciations from Democrats who slammed the proposal as an affront to women’s freedom, the House Judiciary Committee voted 15-8 in favor of what sponsors call the “fetal heartbeat” bill, which would ban abortions after around six to eight weeks of pregnancy.

Though the arguments were tense at times, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle acknowledge that they amount to little more than going through the legislative motions at this point, with few if any House members undecided on how they are going to vote.

Similar bills have already passed the S.C. House multiple times before in years past but were held up in the Senate, where Democrats managed to block them through extensive filibusters. That changed this year after Democrats lost three Senate seats in the 2020 election. The Senate passed the bill last month.

The House could approve the abortion limits as early as next week. Gov. Henry McMaster has pledged to sign the bill when it reaches his desk.

State Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter, D-Orangeburg, said passage of the bill is now effectively inevitable, a fact she said would be clear to anyone who knows how to count.

“There’s nothing that Democrats can do to stop it,” Cobb-Hunter said. “We all know that the fetal heartbeat bill will pass based on the numbers in the House and the Senate. Elections have consequences, and passage of this bill is one of the consequences of November’s elections.”

That didn’t stop Democrats from spending hours speaking up against the bill, pointing out that most members of the committee, and the chamber more broadly, are men who would never have to grapple with the decision of whether or not to go forward with a pregnancy.

Critics of the proposal also note that many women may not realize they are pregnant after just six weeks.

“I believe abortion is a decision a woman should make with her family, her doctor, but not her legislators,” said state Rep. Spencer Wetmore, D-Folly Beach.

State Rep. Seth Rose, D-Columbia, bemoaned that other legislative business “has been bogged down again by a bill that we all know will do absolutely nothing but cost millions of dollars in taxpayer money.”

“In the midst of a pandemic where people and businesses are already hurting, with people out of work, this is what we choose to prioritize?” Rose added. “I think it’s extremely tone deaf and very, very disappointing.”

State Rep. John McCravy, the Greenwood Republican who has long championed efforts to pass abortion bans in the House, said supporters know the bill will face legal challenges but are hopeful that lawsuits will prompt the U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider the boundaries they have set on the issue.

In the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, the court found that women have a constitutional right to access abortions, a precedent they have upheld multiple times with some restrictions.

Many legal experts are skeptical that the high court, even with more conservative justices added in recent years, will be receptive to even taking up the case, let alone deciding in favor of abortion opponents. They have yet to take up less extreme measures, including a 15-week abortion ban in Mississippi.

“It hasn’t persuaded the court so far,” said Carl Tobias, a constitutional law professor at the University of Richmond. “They haven’t shown much appetite for overturning Roe or taking those cases. So maybe this will add fuel to the fire, but I think that’s mostly a political argument.”

Tobias said the case will likely cost the state millions of dollars in attorney fees and take multiple years to wind through the courts. Close to a dozen other states have passed similar bills that are now all tied up in legal challenges.

Democrats proposed four amendments, including ones to require the state to bear financial responsibility for children of women denied abortions or to delay the effective date of the bill to when the Supreme Court rules on a different state’s bill. All were voted down, mostly along party lines.