The idea that women should lose the right to vote is shaping up to be more than a crass punchline or a dystopian viewpoint, but one that Pete Hegseth, a member of the president’s cabinet, appears to agree with. It’s a moment all women need to take seriously, advocates say, no matter how extreme or far-fetched the idea seems.
Hegseth, one of the more drama-inducing members of Trump’s drama-filled cabinet, is making waves (again) for his support for a number of radical—and frankly, disgusting—claims a far-right pastor made about the role women should play in American society.
Late last week, Anderson Cooper 360 aired an interview that CNN’s Pamela Brown did with Doug Wilson, the head of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho. As Brown explains, Wilson has been teaching his extremist views for years but has recently been making inroads with some of the most powerful people in the country, including Pete Hegseth, who she reported has been attending a church recently opened by Wilson in Washington, DC.
Wilson’s litany of outdated stances are numerous, but for starters, CNN reported he has said that he believes that abortion and homosexuality should be illegal, that women should “submit” to their husbands and be unable to vote, and that America should be ruled as a Christian theocracy.
When asked to defend his view on voting specifically by Brown, Wilson described women as “the kind of people that people come out of,” claiming that it takes no “talent to simply reproduce biologically.” Brown asked if this bizarre and confusing description of one half of the population should be taken to mean that Wilson believes having kids is the only purpose for women in the world, but he didn’t really elaborate. Okay, then!
Wilson and his fellow pastors, Jared Longshore and Toby Sumter, told Brown that they advocate for married men voting on behalf of their households.
“In my ideal society, we would vote as households and I would ordinarily be the one that would cast the vote, but I would cast the vote having discussed it with my household,” said Sumter. If the wife disagrees with the husband’s vote, he said, then they can have a “discussion” over that conflict, he added when pressed by Brown.
These views are apparently ideas that Hegseth supports. After the church’s publishing arm, Canon Press, posted a video of the interview, the secretary retweeted it on X, saying “All of Christ for All of Life,” the mission statement of Christ Church. And the Department of Defense, when asked by CNN, said that Hegseth “is a proud member of the network of churches founded by Pastor Wilson” and “very much appreciates many of Mr. Wilson’s writings and teachings.”
And Wilson, according to a video posted by The Tennessee Holler, is also taking Hegseth’s retweet as a show of agreement, saying that the secretary “didn’t just repost it, he reposted it and said amen.”
While Hegseth doesn’t have the authority to unilaterally declare the 19th Amendment over, the fact that he’s sitting in the executive branch feels like a step toward this viewpoint gaining legitimacy. And given how much women’s rights have been eroded in just the past decade, it’s not hyperbolic to call this out as the danger that it is.
“You know how people called women hysterical for predicting the right wing would take down Roe v. Wade (which they’ve done) and then attack access to birth control (which they’re doing)? Hear me when I say that women’s very right to vote is next,” wrote Hillary Clinton on social media, in response to an article about Hegseth’s retweet.
Celina Stewart, the CEO of the League of Women Voters, agreed, telling Glamour that this sort of rhetoric should be treated seriously.
“When leaders entrusted with safeguarding our nation amplify messages that undermine democratic ideals, they normalize the dangerous notion that equality is optional,” she says. “Authoritarianism doesn’t arrive overnight—it advances through small, corrosive concessions disguised as ‘tradition’ or ‘order.’ Every American, regardless of political affiliation, must reject such calls to turn back the clock.”
It’s about more than our right to vote, though. By saying we don’t deserve autonomy over our own participation in democracy, Wilson is effectively relegating women to second-class citizen status. And once we go there, it’s a slippery slope.
“The idea that women should surrender their vote to male authority is an affront to every American who has fought, marched, and bled for the right to be heard,” adds Stewart. “When men make diminishing statements about women, it harms our autonomy and our safety.”
The post Why We Shouldn’t Ignore Pete Hegseth’s Retweet on Women’s Voting Rights appeared first on Glamour.
