Time flies when you’re having fun, and when legislators are trying to get last-minute pieces of legislation over the finish line before time runs out on the 2023-2024 legislative session. The current session ends Thursday, May 9. So far this election year session — where every seat in the Legislature is up for grabs — it has been slow going for socially conservative legislation. The House managed to quickly pass three bills considered to be priorities for the Family Caucus, with only one of the three able to gain any real traction in the Senate.
H4924, the Do No Harm Act, considered to be the top priority for this session, passed the House on Jan. 17 by a vote of 82 to 23. The bill made it through the Senate committee process on March 5, when the Medical Affairs Committee passed it to the Senate floor with a favorable recommendation. As of this writing, the bill has not been set for special order (a must if it has any chance of being debated and passed this session), and it is unclear if the Senate Republican caucus will move the bill to a vote. The Do No Harm Act would prohibit the dispensing of puberty blockers and cross hormone treatments to minors, and it would prevent them from receiving gender reassignment surgery.
H3424, the Child Online Safety Act, passed the House but has not made any progress in the Senate. It was assigned to the Labor, Commerce, and Industry Committee, where no action has been taken to advance the bill through the committee process. The bill would require online porn companies to verify that minors are not using their platforms. A similar law out of Texas has been upheld by the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, causing Pornhub, the largest distributor of online pornography, to cancel access to their sites in that state. It is likely, if South Carolina will pass this bill, that Pornhub would discontinue access here. This would be a major victory, not only for the protection of children, but also for shutting down the exploitation and objectification of women.
According to research conducted by Common Sense Media, 15 percent of children are exposed to pornography before age 10. The same research revealed 74 percent of teenagers aged 13-17 have viewed pornography. Research conducted by the Institute of Family Studies reveals the pervasive and addictive nature of pornography among men. A majority (57 percent) of men aged 30-49 watched pornography in the last month. That number falls only slightly to 44 percent of men aged 18-29. Pornography is also a major problem in the Church. One study revealed up to 64 percent of self-identified Christian men have viewed porn in the last month. While H3424 would not completely solve this problem, causing the largest provider of online porn in the world to suspend access to their destructive, dehumanizing material would certainly help reduce these disturbing numbers.
H4700, the South Carolina Social Media Regulation Act, passed the House 113 to 1. Like H3424, it was assigned to the Labor, Commerce, and Industry Committee in the Senate, where it has received one subcommittee hearing for the purpose of hearing testimony. No action was taken by the committee, and so far, no other committee meeting has been scheduled. H3424 would require minors to have parental permission before they could set up a social media account. According to the U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 Social Media Youth Mental Health Advisory, “virtually all teens (95 percent) ages 13 to 17 use social media, with more than 1 in 3 reporting that they use it almost constantly.” The same survey found “adolescents who use social media more than three hours per day face twice the risk of experiencing poor mental health outcomes.”
With time running out, opportunities for advancing either H3424 or H4700 are slim. Any bill that doesn’t pass before the end of this session will have to start again from the beginning of the legislative process in January 2025. There still may be time for you to contact your senator about these bills. If you don’t know who your state senator is, you can go to scstatehouse.gov and put your address in the “find your legislator” box on the bottom left side of the home page.
Next month, I will begin a series of articles on the top moral issues that are being debated in the political arena and how they are likely to affect the 2024 national elections.