Kamala Harris is leading the presidential race but SC women still aren’t seen as leaders | Opinion

As Kamala Harris attracts crowds as large as and maybe even more enthusiastic than former president Donald Trump’s, and as polling data flows in her direction, I can’t help but note what it says about the country — and my native South Carolina.

The United States may soon rid itself of an inglorious designation as the world’s most important democracy that has never been led by a woman. That’s not because only men are qualified to run. It’s not because men are uniquely suited to be leaders. It’s because this country was created with a faulty philosophy that men and women aren’t equal, a philosophy we’ve uprooted in many ways but not fully. The most glaring evidence of that legacy is the long unbroken line of men who’ve served as president.

We’ll have to wait until votes are counted in November to see if the country takes another giant step toward uprooting that philosophy — a step we should have taken long ago. In the Palmetto State, though, Republicans have not only rolled back women’s rights — and are poised to roll them back further — but they have also made it hard to be a woman with a conscience in the General Assembly. The implications of that are profound even if they won’t be fully recognized for years or even decades.

It was a woman, Kaye Hearn, whose vote on the S.C. Supreme Court was crucial in stopping a barbaric abortion law. When she was forced to retire because of age restrictions, an all-male court — the only one of its kind in the nation at the time — reversed that decision and allowed that barbaric law through. The court is no longer all-male because Justice Letitia Verdin was appointed in June. To underscore how out-of-step the state has been, Verdin is only the third woman in South Carolina to serve on that court — which is now an all-white court.

A group of five women teamed up last year in the General Assembly to prevent a further rolling back of women’s rights concerning access to abortion and related health care. Three of the five were Republicans. They were effective. Their reward? Republican voters kicked them out of office during June primaries, which worsened the state’s historically-awful record on women’s representation in the legislature.

The message has been clear. Women are not to be leaders in South Carolina, not to be heard in ways men don’t like.

That message couldn’t come at a worse time. As the nation seems poised to possibly, finally, break through the highest-hardest ceiling Hillary Clinton cracked, my native state is busy turning back the clock.

My daughter, born and raised in South Carolina like I was, turned 20 a couple of months ago. For years, she’s been telling me how badly she needed to leave the state where most of our large-extended family was born and still resides. It’s not a good place for girls and women, she argued.

I kept reminding her of all the good things, the good times we’ve had, and that she turned out pretty well since coming into the world at Conway Medical Center. South Carolina is gorgeous in many ways, with a lot of good-hardworking people who love God and their neighbors across differences of race, gender and sexuality. I told her the state elected Nikki Haley not long ago. Even that, though, underscored how much women have been shut out, given that Haley was the first, and so far the only, woman to take over the governor’s mansion.

It has been getting harder to give my daughter that pep talk. Young women have good reason to fear they won’t have as many rights as their mothers and grandmothers, and that it will be harder to climb the ranks of political leadership.

South Carolina hasn’t yet returned to the days that would have made my daughter already leave. That any parent fears that possibility should make us all ashamed.

Issac Bailey is a McClatchy Opinion writer in North and South Carolina.