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Sometimes legislators do something so discriminatory and full of hate that it鈥檚 hard to believe someone isn鈥檛 trying to pull your leg. But six Republican legislators in South Carolina last week introduced legislation that would define any marriage not between a man and a woman as a 鈥減arody marriage.鈥� And they鈥檙e deadly serious.

On Feb. 15, Reps. Steven Long, Bill Chumley, Mike Burns, John McCravy, Josiah Magnuson, and Rick Martin introduced the 鈥溾�� in the South Carolina House of Representatives. The bill uses the terms 鈥渕arriage鈥� and 鈥減arody marriage鈥� to redefine what unions the state would recognize. 鈥淧arody marriage,鈥� the legislation says, 鈥渕eans any form of marriage that does not involve one man and one woman.鈥�

The bill is unconstitutional on its face, and the legal analysis it employs is absurd. It relies partly and mistakenly on the Establishment Clause of the Constitution, which states that 鈥淐ongress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion.鈥� Under the Establishment Clause, a secular law means one that is nonreligious while a nonsecular one would be religious in nature. Here鈥檚 where things get absurd. According to these representatives, same-sex marriage is religious because all LGBTQ individuals are members of the 鈥渞eligion of Secular Humanism.鈥� Therefore, same-sex marriage is nonsecular and thus a 鈥減arody marriage鈥� that the state of South Carolina would no longer recognize if the bill passed.

This isn鈥檛 a joke.

The legislation also neglects to define the term parody. According to , a parody is 鈥渁n imitation of the style of a particular writer, artist, or genre with deliberate exaggeration for comic effect." The use of the term by the lawmakers seems to suggest that same-sex marriages are for comic effect. But the only 鈥渃omic effect鈥� here is that the authors actually introduced this bill, with this language, in 2018.

The legislators, however, go further. Same-sex marriage, they believe, was the opening 鈥淪ecular Humanists鈥� needed 鈥渢o infiltrate and indoctrinate minors in public schools to their religious world view which is questionably moral, plausible, obscene, and is not secular.鈥� If you鈥檙e going to introduce such a hateful piece of legislation, you might as well go all the way and throw in some paranoid conspiracy theories, too.

Even if this absurd piece of legislation were to pass the South Carolina legislature, the courts would strike it down as unconstitutional. Marriage equality is settled law, and was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2015. Some lawmakers in South Carolina can鈥檛 handle that, and by engaging in this legislative stunt, they are making a parody of themselves.