COLUMBIA — Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee told a crowd Thursday they need to turn out the votes for a gay marriage ban amendment to South Carolina’s Constitution in November and show “marriage still means something.”

The Republican governor is in South Carolina as chairman of the National Governors Association, which meets in Charleston this weekend. On Thursday, he was also helping raise money for Mike Campbell, who lost his GOP runoff bid for lieutenant governor in June.

Huckabee, who is pondering a 2008 presidential bid, helped a same-sex union constitutional ban pass in Arkansas in 2004 with 75 percent of voters approving.

South Carolina voters will decide in November on ballots with an amendment that says marriage is between one man and one woman.

Marriage needs protection, Huckabee told a people gathered at the “Celebration of Classic Marriage” event to honor a couple who said their vows 74 years ago

Amendment opponents say Huckabee and others are pandering.

Huckabee is among out-of-state politicians “seeking support in South Carolina for their own future presidential bids,” said Asha Leong, the campaign manager for the South Carolina Equality Coalition, a group leading anti-amendment efforts. “South Carolinians really want to hear from other South Carolinians about what the family discrimination amendment means for us all.”

While states have passed bans, efforts to change the U.S. Constitution have failed.

Huckabee, a former Baptist minister, said some have argued the U.S. Constitution is a sacred document that shouldn’t be changed.

But following that logic would, among other things, leave women without the right to vote, he said. The Constitution, “precious as it is, was written to be changed. The holy Bible, on the other hand, is a divine document. It was not written to be changed by us.”

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, also a Republican, is also pushing the amendment. “You’ve drifted a long way when you have to actually go about the business of defining what marriage is,” Sanford said.

State Attorney General Henry McMaster said a change in the state’s constitution keeps courts and the Legislature from opening the law here to same-sex marriages. In a Palmetto Family Council mailer during the past week, McMaster says marriage is on trial with the November vote.

But Leong says this vote is no trial, and countered that the amendment isn’t needed because state law already limits marriages.

“This vote is really about the civil and human rights of everyone in this state and how all of us deserve equality,” she said.

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