Hegseth’s ties to a Christian nationalist movement that rejects women’s suffrage expose how extremist views are fueling real policies aimed at undermining women’s political power.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth retweeted a CNN interview last week with Christian nationalist pastors from the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), in which they argued that women should not be able to vote. In the interview, church co-founder Doug Wilson reduces women to “the kind of people that people come out of” and sneers that “it doesn’t take any talent to simply reproduce.” Other CREC pastors in the video argue that families should cast a single vote—decided by the man.
It took nearly a week, and much public criticism, for a spokesperson for Hegseth to clarify that “of course” he supports women’s right to vote. That’s too little, too late.
This was no fringe rant from the manosphere. CREC has more than 130 affiliate churches around the globe, and Hegseth is a member of a CREC-affiliated church in Tennessee. He recently attended the first service at Christ Church, D.C., the newest church in the network.
CREC’s doctrine is clear: It teaches that wives should submit to their husbands and allows male church members to cast church votes for the whole household. Wilson says that adopting the 19th Amendment––which granted women the right to vote––was a “bad idea.”
The fact that the U.S. secretary of defense is now publicly aligning himself with these views should alarm every American. Hegseth is not just any churchgoer; he’s a Cabinet official lending credibility to a movement that openly seeks to roll back women’s rights by more than a century. Second only to the president, Hegseth is also the highest-ranking civilian in command of America’s military, which includes over 230,000 women.
This isn’t the first time Hegseth has promoted sexist ideas and policies. Before his nomination, he argued that women in the military shouldn’t be able to serve in combat roles—a stance he downplayed during his Senate confirmation hearing. Hegseth was also accused of sexual assault and paid out a $50,000 settlement to his accuser. Now, from the Pentagon, he is aligning himself with a Christian nationalist movement whose vision for America would push women out of political life entirely.
While most MAGA Republicans aren’t as forthcoming as Wilson and Hegseth about their extreme views on gender, the policies they champion betray their true beliefs.
Take the so-called SAVE Act, which has already been passed by the House of Representatives and could be considered by the Senate upon Congress’ return in September. The Republican bill requires in-person documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote, like a birth certificate matching the voter’s current legal name. That sounds simple enough, but in practice, the bill is an attack on women’s right to vote. An analysis by the Center for American Progress estimates that as many as 69 million women lack a birth certificate that matches their current legal name, usually because they changed their name upon getting married. Under the SAVE Act, these women could be denied the right to vote unless they navigate a time-consuming, often confusing bureaucratic process to update their paperwork. For any woman who has changed her name after marriage, it would have the same effect as Wilson’s suggestion that families get one vote: the man’s.
If we stay silent, anti-women policies like the SAVE Act will keep moving forward until they’ve erased decades of progress.
The SAVE Act—and similar bills popping up all around the country, including in Texas, Indiana and Ohio—fit squarely within the MAGA movement’s broader agenda: restrict reproductive rights, police gender roles and rebrand sexism as “traditional values.” Hegseth’s retweet wasn’t just a wink to the far-right—it was a signal that these ideas have allies in the President’s Cabinet.
The 19th Amendment was won only after decades of organizing, protest and sacrifice by women who refused to accept second-class citizenship. It then took decades longer—until the passage of the Voting Rights Act—to make the promise of the 19th Amendment a reality for many Black women. And while the 19th Amendment isn’t going away today, the normalization of rhetoric that questions women’s equality is dangerous. It shifts the boundaries of what’s considered politically acceptable and makes room for policies that chip away at women’s hard-fought progress.
We can’t treat Hegseth’s embrace of Doug Wilson and CREC as harmless or a fringe curiosity. Every time these ideas go unchallenged, they become a little more mainstream, and the distance between talk and policy shrinks. That’s why we need to call it out—loudly, clearly and often. If we stay silent, anti-women policies like the SAVE Act will keep moving forward until they’ve erased decades of progress.
When Congress returns in a few weeks, lawmakers should reject the SAVE Act––or be prepared to answer to millions of American women.
Great Job Christina Harvey & the Team @ Ms. Magazine Source link for sharing this story.
