Quote:
Originally Posted by mark46th
How about a little closer to home?
South Carolina CONSTITUTION SECTION 33.
Age of consent.
— No unmarried woman shall legally consent to sexual intercourse who shall not have attained the age of fourteen years. (1999 Act No. 3, Section 1, eff February 16, 1999)
Editors Note: Although the AOC in South Carolina is hard coded into the constitution, state statutes specify criminality for sexual conduct under the age of 16."
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Article III, Section 33 of the South Carolina Constitution dates to the 19th Century. 1999 Act No. 3 was an amendment which deleted an old part of Section 33 making certain interracial marriages illegal. This provision was already unconstitutional due to
Loving v. Virginia (1967), so the 1999 amendment was a cleanup.
The rest of Section 33 was inconsistent with the state's statutory rape statutes, as the editor's note in your quote shows. It was removed by 2010 Act No. 208, effective June 2, 2010. Oddly, the ballot measure only passed by 52% of the vote. This was probably not because 48% of South Carolina voters wanted to keep the age at 14, but because they were confused and thought the amendment would remove the age of consent altogether, not realizing that state statutes had already raised it to 16. Currently, Art. III, Section 33 reads "(Reserved)".
The situation in South Carolina is the opposite of the situation in Germany. In South Carolina, you see progress, removing older discriminatory and questionable laws, while Germany is regressing.
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