Today in the bizarre world of state politics, I bring you Steve Lefemine of South Carolina, a man terrified of a photo of women in power.
Lefemine, the Columbia Christians for Life director, spent his Tuesday afternoon as he spends a great many afternoons, preaching about Jesus and, naturally, the dangers of empowering women to be members of the South Carolina General Assembly. He is a goofball and a creep and is not taken seriously by even the uber-Christians that sit in the legislature.
His latest antics, though—railing against the idea of commemorating women lawmakers as a “destructive and evil” symbol of feminism—managed to draw the ire of multiple legislators on the 10-member committee (nine of whom are men), according to The State. Well, at least after they gave him a few minutes to drone on first.
Lefemine showed up today to oppose a proposal before the South Carolina State House Committee to memorialize the women of the General Assembly by hanging a photo of the current members. In doing so, he passed out anti-feminism brochures, cited some lines from a 2,000-year-old book about a woman’s place in the home, and read from an article headlined, “The Feminism of the Mothers is the Destruction of the Daughters.” (The headline is a real doozy, but the blog post itself is like half Bible verses and half incoherent anti-abortion ramblings.)
Eventually, one of the members cut him off before Republican Ann Thayer, the only woman on the State House Committee, flipped a Bible verse back on Lefemine and addressed the other women in the room, saying, “We can’t let things like this stand in our way.”
While Lefemine is a buffoon, his desires are far closer to reality than any kind of equal representation. To say that South Carolina has a representation issue in its state legislature is a bit of an understatement: There are just four women in the 46-member Senate, and that registers as an all-time high for that chamber, per The State. On the whole, women representatives make up just 16 percent of the South Carolina General Assembly, well below the (also pitiful) national average of 25.6 percent, per the National Conference of State Legislatures.
As The State pointed out, the entire mess was eventually rendered irrelevant thanks to an inconvenient state law that prohibits adding monuments on House grounds. So Lefemine and his ilk can rest easy, and South Carolina this whole feminism thing to go rest.