Turn Out for What

Voting as Antidote

I don’t think anyone I’ve ever voted for in South Carolina has won. My first experience voting here, in 2012, was exhilarating. After a decade of voting by mail in Oregon (a wonderful system, especially for taking the time to carefully consider the candidates), I dutifully found my polling place, a small church in Clinton. I was surprised to see we’d be voting in a church, it seemed a strange confluence of church and state, but it was fun to be voting in public, with other people. My sense of civic duty swelled as I stepped into the voting booth.

            Drawing the curtain closed behind me, I turned to the screen, to find what at first appeared to be only half of a ballot. Then I realized most of the Republican candidates were running unopposed. Over the last decade, experiences like these remind me that South Carolina has never had a fully functional, representational democracy. It’s a pretty corrupt system, elite white rule never really losing its grip.

Voting in a June 2018 primary. Alex is as confused about the state of SC politics as me!

            Nevertheless, I persist. Hope is springing eternal this year that heartthrob Joe Cunningham can wrest the governorship out of the hands of Foghorn governor Henry McMaster (he truly embodies the old white Southern patriarch, so confident in his male privilege that he can eschew any updates to what is a truly awful hairstyle). I’m crossing all my fingers and toes that Lisa Ellis, the only legitimate candidate for superintendent of education, can beat Ellen Weaver, a nightmare scenario Christian nationalist Bob Joneser who fails to meet the minimum education requirements of a master’s degree in education (Bob Jones is trying to get her one, in a highly questionable fast-tracking situation). At the local level, a shakeup in the Greenville County Council is underway.

            As Erin McAdams reminded us in the last newsletter, voting can transform societies. At the local level, the Greenville County Council appoints important committees, like the Greenville County Library Board of Trustees. This group has the power to counter attempts at book banning, but the current makeup of the Board includes a clearly homophobic chair Allan Hill, and a publicly homophobic board member Sid Cates. At a County Council meeting in Greenville this week voting on a resolution to continue to restrict access to LGBTQ material (the resolution failed, thankfully), Cates had to be escorted out of the meeting by police, as my good friend and Communication Studies professor Brandon Inabinet witnessed and recounted in a recent Facebook post:

“The head of the Materials Committee is Library Board member Sid Cates. Yesterday in reaction to a person saying he was gay, Sid loudly yelled “barf” in the formal Council meeting. The speaker went on to say that he had contemplated suicide but that having librarians who did not condemn or hate him and access to knowledge saved him. Sid was escorted out by police.

Another library Board member compared my wife to a Nazi publicist for hosting an LGBTQ option among the book clubs. Another library Board member was a part of the January 6 insurrection.

This is what Trump’s America looks like. Made up fear mongering and hate campaigns that absorbs the time and energy of qualified people trying to do their job well.

Petulant “bad boys” in seats where authority and wisdom are required.”

To say that local politics matter is clearly an understatement. We know that the majority of South Carolinians do not support outlawing abortion and targeting LGBTQ children. Let’s hope enough of us turn out. Vote early right now or on Election Day November 8th.