The 2024 South Carolina legislative session opened on Tuesday, Jan. 9, with House Republicans presenting three bills for sub-committee hearings. Usually, you can depend on the South Carolina Legislature to move slowly and deliberately, especially on the first day of the session. So, when the opening day schedule included a 3M Medical Affairs Sub-Committee hearing on H4624 (Do No Harm), a lot of people sat up and took notice. The House Republican Leadership, along with the Family Caucus (48 conservative lawmakers), set three bills for hearings during the first week of the session. The goal is to get these three bills through the committee process and on to the House floor for debate and early passage.
On opening day, the Family Caucus held a press conference on the second floor of the State House to promote H4624. In addition to many Republican representatives, mostly from the Family Caucus, the press conference was attended by a group of pastors and conservative community leaders who came to lend their support to the bill. H4624 would ban transgender surgery, puberty blockers, and cross-hormone treatment for minors. Twenty-two states have passed legislation that, to varying degrees, limit transgender treatment for minors. Southeastern states include Mississippi, Florida, North Carolina, Louisiana, Tennessee, Alabama, West Virginia, and Georgia. Ohio passed a bill that was vetoed by Gov. Mike DeWine (R), who raised concerns about banning the procedures over the objections of parents. As of this writing, the Ohio House voted to override the governor’s veto, and the Senate is expected to follow suit.
H4624 passed the 3M Medical Affairs Sub-Committee on a 5 to 1 vote. It passed the full committee with a favorable report, and the House is expected to send the bill on to the Senate, where it will go through a slower process, but it is expected to pass.
Two other bills made it to the House Judiciary Sub-Committee on Thursday of the first week. H3424 (Child Online Safety Act) would require purveyors of online pornography to verify the age of those who visit their websites. Many of the primary providers of porn have threatened to make their websites unavailable in states that enact legislation requiring age verification. The owners of these sites know if they allowed a minor to gain access, they would be subject to lawsuits that would have the potential to shut them down. The South Carolina Baptist Convention passed a resolution at our 2023 meeting calling on our legislators to take action to protect minors from access to pornography. I submitted a copy of our resolution to the committee members, and I offered testimony in favor of the bill at the sub-committee hearing. Several constitutional questions were raised concerning some of the language in the bill, causing it to be held over for another meeting. Those issues are expected to be resolved, and the bill will likely pass the House and head to the Senate.
H4700 (South Carolina Social Media Regulation Act) would require parental permission for minors to set up a social media account. There have been several scientific studies conducted that point out the detrimental effects of prolonged social media use by adolescents. One cohort study listed at the National Center for Biotechnology Information found “that U.S. adolescents aged 12-15 who spent more than three hours per day on social media faced a double risk of experiencing poor mental health outcomes, including symptoms of depression and anxiety.” Requiring social media companies to obtain parental permission before setting up an account for a minor would be a positive step toward reversing those negative outcomes. The bill was held over in committee while lawmakers work on strengthening its language to increase its ability to pass an expected court challenge.