Preamble
When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for a community to challenge the attempt of a collaboration of persons and corporations adverse to the regular standards of polity which intend to disrupt its decent governance and happiness, the citizens this Lowcountry must assume their powers as citizens of the State and Nation to prevent the subversion of their democracy. Their rights to protect and defend their community, to which the Laws of the Nation, and sacred tradition entitle them, demand that decent respect to the opinions of the full community and those connected to it require that they should declare the causes which impel them to take up agency in the civic contest and select the shape of our common future.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people are created equal, that they are endowed at their creation with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among people, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. --that whenever any group of people attempting to assert control of that government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to urge others in pursuit of the democratic process and free speech to assert their rights and values to shape the form and action of that government, laying its foundation of that government on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that civic contests between friends, neighbors and family waged in the halls of government and within elections should not begin or continue for light and transient causes. All experience shows that people are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right strife between neighbors. Such contests impose a cost upon shared happiness and good order that should be avoided when possible. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursues invariably a design to reduce the community to domination based on religious belief, irrational prejudice, and greed, it is their right, it is our duty, to preserve and improve our diverse community, and to provide new guards for its future progress.--Such has been the patient sufferance of we citizens; and such is now the necessity which constrains us to act to preserve our local systems of democratic government.
The history of the two year attempt to force a religious dominion over our public life in the Lowcountry is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of a religious dominion over our shared lives. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid nation.
I - Government
They have combined to place candidates onto the ballots of our elections committed to their secret agendas to deceive voters and after election disappoint citizens.
They have met with our public officials to influence them outside of public knowledge with the purpose of attempting to coerce them to abandon our established standards for the separation of church and state and the maintenance of religious liberty.
They have stripped women of their rights to control their own bodies and reproductive destiny.
They have forced women to carry babies with no hope of survival, inflicting suffering, infertility and possible death on women who might otherwise anticipate a happy future as willing mothers.
II - Education
They induced a respected educator to leave his previous job and home in Wisconsin and come to Charleston to serve as Superintendent of Charleston County School District (CCSD). He brought his ailing mother with him. They conspired to undermine his work, made groundless charges against him and squandered over 300 thousand dollars purchasing his resignation when their own investigation proved he had done nothing wrong.
They hired a replacement Superintendent without a formal search and without a public vote, in violation of notice and voting requirements clearly set out in SC law.
They have attempted to remove a legally elected Vice Chairman of the school board for seeking counsel from the district's retained attorney and attempted to control which members of the board are allowed to seek the advice of the district’s legal counsel.
They removed the entire membership of the CCSD health education committee without cause and ended work on a curriculum for the sexual education of disabled students.
They have conspired to eliminate AP African American studies from the high school curriculum and timed their actions in a way calculated to humiliate the African American community in the midst of graduations and on the eve of Juneteenth.
III - Family
They have denigrated and insulted transgendered and gay people in their May 2024 Unity City training session and other gatherings.
They have suggested families different from their own are not of equal dignity with the family structures they approve of.
They have introduced acrimony into family gatherings, once a source of comfort, with the object of alienating people from their own relations, setting parent against child and siblings against one another.
IV - Media
They have threatened and manipulated local media to control who and what is heard and to create the illusion that the community supports their agenda.
They have presented the media with accounts of their own actions which are incomplete, dismissive and often dishonest.
They have excused actions which have devoured thousands of hours of citizens time with a single vague sentence with the bald assertion that victories in elections, even when the hid their agenda, justify eliminating the rights of citizens.
They have called meetings of the school board at times to evade public attention and frustrate the work of the press. Most significantly, scheduling the most relevant issues so they will be decided and considered after midnight or at 8am on a weekday.
They have repeatedly violated the Freedom of Information Act by calling inappropriate executive sessions.
V - Religion and Faith
They have conspired to disrupt the life and operation of faith communities not in support of their agenda by sending trained agents into other peoples’ churches for the purpose of disrupting them and obtaining control of them, or in the alternative, alienating parts of their membership.
They have suggested that persons who are not “Christ centered” as they define it are unworthy to serve as leaders of our community and their opinions about public affairs are of diminished significance.
VI - Art and Culture
They have threatened the public support of arts and culture and suggested only works supportive of their religious opinions are worthy of presentation.
They have worked actively to prevent individuals and organizations whose opinions differ from their own from finding public gathering places by threatening to boycott business owners who afford them space while insisting businesses locations be available to themselves.
They have threatened the Charleston County Library with actions against librarians based on standards which are impermissibly vague and defy the application of due process.
They have squandered thousands of hours of staff and citizens time attempting to purge books from the libraries of the Berkeley County School District which they evidently have never bothered to read.
They have, through political manipulation, public dishonesty and personal acrimony sought to drive those citizens who disagree with and oppose them from this community, even when those persons they insult come from families with centuries of presence here, and while most of them have only recently arrived from elsewhere. They have done this in disregard to those persons previous contributions to the community and to the future benefits they might confer on the Lowcountry were they to remain here.
VII - Science and Technology
They have denied the reality of climate change and sea level rise in an area where increasing flooding and the threat of larger and more frequent hurricanes materially reduces our quality of life and economic competitiveness.
They have by threat and political coercion deprived children suffering from gender dysphoria from obtaining treatment from the Medical University Of South Carolina. In addition, they have denied the reality of these children's conditions.
They have prolonged an epidemic which took over a million American lives by an irrational resistance to common and well established public health measures and have chosen to substitute superstition and rumor for scientifically established fact.
Resolution and Call to Action
In every stage of this mounting assault upon the continued happiness of the Lowcountry, we have petitioned these persons to respect our established laws, traditions and culture. We have asked them to restrain themselves and to consider the damage they have already done to our schools, governments, institutions and communities. Our repeated petitions have been answered only by new outrages. Leaders who act thusly cannot be trusted with management of the government and institutions of a large and ancient community composed of people from around the world and throughout the US as well as residents of long tenure.
We have called on their numerous supporters to engage in kindness and restraint.
We have asked these people, lately our friends and neighbors, to consider the long and enduring damage that is being done in the name of the Christian religion which they claim as their own.
We have reminded them of our long and complex history, which has carried us as a community through so many privations and disasters from the wars and disasters of long ago to the more recent shooting at Mother Emanuel and the Covid 19 pandemic. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common experience to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and imperfect, but enduring common respect. They have grown deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our division and hold them, as the misguided and destructive victims of an expansively propagated set of delusions.
We, therefore, the subscribing Citizens of the Lowcountry, organized as DiversCity, appealing to our friends and neighbors for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by authority of the good people of the SC Lowcountry, solemnly publish and declare, that we shall gather, stand, speak, demonstrate, vote and organize to preserve and increase our communities long and evolving practice of tolerance, inclusion, diversity and equity for all people who find themselves here without regard to their religious belief or practice, their gender, the nature of their affections, their race, their age or their differing abilities. That any portions of our government which have fallen under the influence of Christian Nationalists, Dominionists or Sovereign Citizens shall be resisted until such time as exercise of the vote has restored them to public confidence.
And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on good sense and decency of most of our family, neighbors and friends, we mutually pledge our shared effort to restore the Lowcountry to a healthy polity, good humor and a secure, shared hope for better days ahead.