I spent many years living in South Carolina, and it is a lovely state that is home to some wonderful people. My kids were born there and have gone on to much success since.

But I have to admit the Palmetto State — named for the tree, by the way, and not the extremely noxious Palmetto Bug, also known as one gigantenormous cockroach — also shelters some people best described as . . . well, probably best left alone. Take my word for it. Please.

I’m not referring to the deranged mother who drove her two small children into a deep lake and then abandoned them. That really happened, by the way. Nor am I talking about the man who held up a couple on the streets of Charleston, asked them to remove their clothes and then ran off with their clothes, leaving behind their money, jewelry and credit cards. That really happened, too. And then there was the guy who wanted to marry his sheep. And then there was Strom Thurmond. But, well, you surely get the idea.

No, my thoughts went burbling back to South Carolina recently when I read that the state’s attorney general has inserted himself into the discussion over the issue of same-sex marriage. It is now legal in a majority of states, of course, and most people seem to believe the Supreme Court will make it official in a ruling later this year.

The South Carolina attorney general has a novel view of this. His contention, if I might sum it up briefly, is that the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution — adopted in 1868 and declaring that everyone is entitled to equal protection under the law — was approved by a group of people who at that time explicitly discriminated against women. Hence, they would certainly approve discrimination against gays and lesbians, including the banning of same-sex marriages.

You’ve got to admit there’s somebody in South Carolina who’s really thinking out of the box, if by box you mean abandoning the basic parameters of logic and sensibility for the sort of thinking that once assigned slaves the value of three-fifths of a single non-slave person. And that happened when we had people like James Madison and Thomas Jefferson around.

Anyhow, I’d rather think good thoughts about South Carolina, in spite of its somewhat checkered history. Charleston, for instance, is voted as the nation’s friendliest city in polls year after year, and it really is a place where fabled southern hospitality lives on. Boston, by the way, has not showed up in those polls since 1775, when the British started voting.

I love the South Carolina beaches. They are unspoiled, and by unspoiled I mean it is still possible to see an occasional grain of sand through all the semi-naked bodies and beach towels laying on it in July. Myrtle Beach is the most popular beach resort on the East Coast and boasts more golf courses than New Hampshire has Republican presidential candidates, although not by much, I grant you.

South Carolina has beaches and mountains and a whole lot of flat, plain stuff in between. Sort of like a sandwich in which the bread is really yummy and the ingredients are close to plaster-board taste. I naturally lived in the middle. There were competitions among some of the smaller towns in the middle to see which one truly deserved the title of “the armpit of America.” I always thought it was mostly a tie between 34 of them.

South Carolina claims to have more churches per capita than any other state, and they do have a number of gorgeous, historical churches. The state also claims it is the only state in the Union that deserves to be called Carolina, since North Carolina is a late-comer and pretender, much like South Dakotans probably feel about North Dakota, although my usually thorough online research has not yet turned up information on exactly where the Dakotas are on the map. West of the Monadnocks, I believe.

So in conclusion, I would like to think I’ve helped my fellow Granite Staters understand a little more about the place I once called home. I hope everyone has an opportunity to travel there soon; you won’t regret it, I assure you. You’ll get to it pretty much the way everyone does: drive south of Boston until it stops snowing, and then make a left just before you get to Florida. If you get to the place where restaurants are advertising that early-bird dinners start at 3:30 p.m., you’ve gone too far.

Or you’ve accidentally driven into South Dakota. And if so, please do let me know exactly where it is. I hear it’s really pretty there.