Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) has inexplicably shared and boasted about a video she filmed that shows her engaging in a heated confrontation with a constituent over the weekend.
In a video the lawmaker posted on X, formerly Twitter, on Saturday, a man standing several feet away from Mace — who has since been identified as South Carolina realtor Ely Murray-Quick — can be seen asking her whether she has plans to host a town hall event this year.
After a back-and-forth with Mace insisting she plans to do “plenty more” town halls — and before the exchange turned into an expletive-laden argument — the lawmaker said at one point: “And by the way, I voted for gay marriage twice.”
“What does that have to do with me?” Murray-Quick responded.
“It has everything to do with you,” Mace said. The realtor did not mention his sexual orientation during the exchange captured on video, and Mace has not indicated that she was familiar with him.
“Do you think everything about me has to do with gay marriage?” Murray-Quick continued. “That’s your first stance when you speak with me? There’s no other humane conversation you can have about me?”
The congresswoman called Murray-Quick an “unhinged lunatic” and “a man wearing daisy dukes” in a post about the incident on X.
Murray-Quick has since shared the video he took of the exchange on Facebook, as well as a lengthy statement about the incident.
“Your vitriol in your statements alone, Nancy, makes it crystal clear that you’re not someone who truly cares about all people — just the ones who stroke your ego or your campaign checks,” he said about Mace, who represents South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District. “In your own words, on video, you reduced an entire community of LGBTQ+ individuals to one political issue: gay marriage. That’s all we are to you?”
He continued: “Just because you treat your ‘yay’ vote like it’s some revolutionary act of grace doesn’t mean you get to look down on us as if you’ve done us a favor we should grovel for.”
Murray-Quick did not immediately return a request for comment.
Bill Clark via Getty Images
Mace has a history that’s led to this point.
Mace has been widely criticized for using trans slurs, spewing anti-trans rhetoric and for targeting transgender people by introducing a measure to ban transgender women from using the women’s bathrooms at the Capitol.
She has also faced backlash from some South Carolina voters who were outraged that she declined an invitation to speak to her constituents at a town hall event in March. Voters who attended the town hall reportedly expressed their concerns about possible cuts to Medicaid, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Education, among other concerns they’ve had since President Donald Trump took office.
Earlier this month, Mace called people who had called her office to criticize Trump and his billionaire adviser Elon Musk “evil.”
Deepak Sarma, Inaugural Distinguished Scholar in the Public Humanities at Case Western Reserve University, told HuffPost that Mace had shown a “disdain for people that disagree with her” and made assumptions about Murray-Quick during the exchange that were “unwanted and harmful stereotypes.”
The interaction exposed a major issue, as Sarma pointed out: Mace appeared to assume that Murray-Quick is a “single-issue voter” — and her rhetoric suggested that he owed her something.
“She assumes that the voter is a single-issue voter, and is voting out of mere self-interest and not for the common good,” Sarma said. “Such assumptions are alienating and embrace homogeneity rather than embracing diversity. In many ways, celebrating diversity has been a hallmark of America and American life. Such stereotyping ends, rather than initiates, conversation.”
Mace’s remark about her support for gay marriage seems transactional — and therefore not sincere.
“Her rhetorical strategy to declare that she voted for gay marriage twice (whether the voter [cares] about it or not) hints at her sense that the voter ought to be obligated to her and that the voter ‘owes her,’” Sarma said.
“In addition to virtue signaling, it also seems to have the opposite effect: Namely that her vote was transactional, insincere and strategic,” they continued. “Her language also implies that the voter will never be satisfied, no matter what, and is ungrateful.”
“Everyone, and especially Nancy Mace, would benefit from studying dialogue and debate as a humane discipline,” they added.
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