You definitely do not want to enable the hardware USART if you want to use any bit-banged serial routines like SEROUT/SERIN or SEROUT2/SERIN2 on the hardware RX/TX pins.
Enabling the hardware USART prevents you from using the TX/RX pins as digital, so bit-banged serial commands can't control these pins.
And double-check your connections to the ST232. I suspect you have TX and RX backwards.
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