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“In my ideal society, we would vote as households,” Doug Wilson, an extreme right-wing pastor said in a video clip posted to X, formerly known as Twitter. “And I would ordinarily be the one that would cast the vote, but I would cast the vote having discussed it with my household.”
It was part of last Thursday’s CNN segment on Wilson, who believes in Christian reconstruction, an extreme version of Christianity that does not support the right of women to vote. But if that wasn’t disturbing enough on its own, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth reposted the video last week, simply commenting “All of Christ for All of Life.” When Slate magazine reached out to the Pentagon earlier this week seeking clarification on whether or not Hegseth believed women should vote, an agency spokesperson responded with a statement that notably did not say Hegseth believed in women’s right to vote.
When asked for comment, the Pentagon pointed HuffPost to a transcript of a Thursday press briefing in which a spokesperson responds to a reporter by saying, “On your second question about the 19th Amendment, of course the secretary thinks that women should have the right to vote,” said Kingsley Wilson, the Department of Defense press secretary. “That’s a stupid question.”
She does not explain why Hegseth reposted the video.
Julie Ingersoll, a University of North Florida religious studies professor who focuses on Christian reconstructionism, warns the belief isn’t as fringe as you might think.
“They are explicit about the fact that women should submit. The model for women shouldn’t have a vote is already there,” she told HuffPost.
Take a quick glance at comments about the video Hegseth reshared: “You see a lot of people [on social media] saying, ‘I see nothing wrong with this,’” Ingersoll said. “It’s a shocking number of people.”
Opposition to women voting is hardly new — after the 19th Amendment granted women voting rights in 1920, there were plenty of detractors — but in Trump’s second term, the proponents of these beliefs are certainly sensing an opportunity to do some real damage.
A few years ago, the idea that women shouldn’t have the vote would be seen as an absurd stance, close to conspiracy theory. But in recent years, as far-right stances become more mainstream and so called “traditional” gender roles reemerge as a cultural talking point, it feels much more dangerous. When a member of the president’s cabinet has to be asked about whether he stands behind the 19th Amendment, what does that mean for where the political winds are blowing?
Experts don’t believe that women’s right to vote is in imminent danger, but brushing it off as right-wing nonsense isn’t necessarily the right way to approach this movement either.
“The characterization of [Wilson] as ‘extremism’ can be problematic,” Ingersoll said. “You think you don’t have to pay attention to it, but they’ve been building on this for years.”
There is a long relationship between evangelical Christians and the GOP, like when controversial pastors like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson were leading the movement to push more Christianity into public life. But Ingersoll says the second Trump term is in new terrain. “The religious right has always been in the room, but not in the way the Christian nationalists are today.”
Opponents of women’s rights have been emboldened by Trump, who has been willing to implement a Christian nationalist agenda in exchange for votes. (He also has a bad track record when it comes to respecting women.)
“Trump can be president as long as he’s doing God’s will,” Ingersoll summed up the thinking.
Though Trump denied being involved with it on the campaign trail, he has been using Project 2025, the ultraconservative policy guide, as a playbook for his second term. One of the architects of it, Russell Vought, is now the head of the Office of Personnel Management, the powerful agency which oversees the federal government’s civil servant workforce.
“Project 2025 was written by Christian nationalists,” Ingersoll said. “And that’s who the administration has hired.” The administration has implemented policies that allow federal workers to proselytize at work, launched anti-Christian bias task forces based on false claims of discrimination, and allowed tax-exempt churches to engage in political activity, a significant weakening of the separation of church and state.
It’d probably be difficult for the Trump administration to lead an effort to repeal a constitutional amendment, which is what would be required to strip women’s right to vote on paper. But that doesn’t mean they can’t deal a serious blow to women’s rights.
“They’ll stop women from voting the same way they stopped Black people from voting,” Ingersoll said.
The conservative right has spent decades rolling back the Voting Rights Act, the landmark civil rights legislation which protected Black people’s right to vote. But the strategy has never been to outright overturn it, which would likely cause public outcry and hard-to-deny accusations of racism. Nor has the right directly attacked the universal male suffrage encoded in the 14th Amendment, which would be even harder for the same reasons. Instead, the plan has been simply to chip away at the ability to access those rights.
There are myriad laws throughout the country that make it harder for marginalized people to vote, many of which disproportionately affect Black voters. Voter ID laws that require drivers licenses, birth certificates or passports in order to cast a ballot put onerous restrictions on citizens without those documents, which often cost money and time to obtain. Government officials have altered the times and locations of where people can vote, like by eliminating early voting days, closing down polling locations or reducing access to mail-in ballots. These restrictions can make it difficult for people who don’t work traditional hours or who live in rural areas to cast a ballot.
They also put women at risk: Women are more likely to have low-paying or multiple jobs without those traditional hours or be busy with being the primary caregiver of their children and other relatives.
“Different policies to make it harder for people to vote will impact women of all different backgrounds,” Kelly Marino, an associate professor of history at Sacred Heart University who specializes in women’s suffrage and other gender issues, told HuffPost.
Indeed, we are already seeing it — in April, the House passed the SAVE Act, legislation that would effectively strip married women of their voting rights. The bill would have required registering to vote using the name on one’s birth certificate or passport, which often does not match married women’s IDs, since many women take their spouse’s last name. According to Politico, an estimated 69 million women have a birth certificate that doesn’t match their legal name. If it becomes law, millions of people will have had to either pay to get their birth certificates altered or pay to get a new passport. It has so far not been taken up in the Senate.
And the strategy of chipping away at rather than eliminating rights has already been used against women, albeit in another arena. For years, conservatives pursued an anti-abortion strategy of constructing road block after road block to accessing reproductive care, even as pregnant people still had the right to abortion on paper.
When the movement culminated in the overturn of national abortion rights in 2022’s Supreme Court case Dobbs v. Jackson, the conservative majority framed the decision not as the eliminating a constitutional right, but as granting permission for states to regulate — including by banning — what had once been a national right. “[T]he people of the various States may evaluate those interests differently,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion.
In a concurrence, Justice Brett Kavanaugh glibly added, “may a State bar a resident of that State from traveling to another State to obtain an abortion? In my view, the answer is no based on the constitutional right to interstate travel.”
But besides a cultural and religious objection to women’s independence, there is a very real political factor as well behind the push to deny women the ballot: When women gained the right to vote, it changed the political landscape.
In the last few decades, the number of female voters has steadily increased. In every presidential election since 1984, women have turned out in higher numbers than men. There is also a large gender gap between the two parties, with women tilting heavily for Democrats compared to men.
The gap is even wider for young women, who have become increasingly liberal. A Gallup poll analysis found that between 2017 and 2024, an average of 40% of women aged 18-29 identified as liberal, a 12-point increase from the years 2001 to 2007. This increase has also coincided with a record number of women elected to public office.
Barring any drastic changes, the number of women identifying as liberal or Democratic is likely to continue to increase. Which is perhaps why conservatives suggest big changes: In 2016, after a FiveThirtyEight poll suggested that Democrat Hillary Clinton would easily win the presidential election if only women voted, and Trump if only men voted, the hashtag #repealthe19th went viral on social media.
Eight years on, the political landscape is very different. But experts think that women voters will continue to push back on GOP policies — and officials.
“I don’t think we’re doomed, these policies are hitting people on a day-to-day level,” Marino said. “I don’t think it’s a death sentence for women’s rights. People are going to wake up.”