These Christian men want women barefoot, pregnant… and off the voter rolls

Influential pastors and right-wing figures are openly arguing women shouldn’t vote

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Roughly 80% of white evangelical voters have supported Donald Trump in the previous three presidential elections, and a significant percentage of those voters were white evangelical women. But there’s a movement afoot within those circles to prevent women from voting at all because their husbands should represent their entire family.

A recent New York Times article explores a small but growing movement of ultra-conservative Christians who fantasize about repealing the 19th Amendment and putting head scarves on women (while ironically railing against the dangers of “Sharia Law”).

One of the weak men leading this movement is TheoBro Dale Partridge, who runs King’s Way Reformed Church in Prescott, Arizona, where women are taught to be submissive to their husbands and men are told to… be more manly, I guess. And everyone plays their role perfectly:

Dale Partridge (screenshot via YouTube)

[Marybelle East’s] head scarf is a physical reminder of biblical patriarchy, the kind of marriage the church preaches. “It keeps me from running my mouth,” she said.

To her and the other women, patriarchy also means ceding their political voices to their husbands. They believe America would be better off if women could not vote.

…

To people at King’s Way, feminism is what’s weird, and women holding civil authority, or voting independently, is what’s unnatural.

“The results just speak for themselves,” Ms. Partridge, 36, said of female independence. “Everybody seems more stressed out, angry, frustrated with one another, depressed.”

It never occurs to him that the problem isn’t feminism but rather that we’re all stressed out, angry, and frustrated because people like Partridge are among those running the country.

And that’s the issue here. It’s not that this one church holds radical views; it’s that people like him are in government or have influence over it.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared a clip last summer of pastors in his ultraconservative denomination, which holds that America is a Christian nation whose laws should reflect Christian tenets, arguing that women should be barred from voting. In 2024, the popular conservative wellness podcaster Alex Clark said on her show that she “wouldn’t mind if it was just the male head of household that voted.” A prominent anti-abortion activist who spoke at the 2020 Republican National Convention, Abby Johnson, has also endorsed household voting.

Christian Nationalist Doug Wilson, who heads up Hegseth’s church and has plenty of influence in this administration, has echoed these thoughts too.

Last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reposted a CNN interview of his pastor, Christian nationalist Doug Wilson, writing “All of Christ for All of Life.” In the video, church members discussed why they believe women shouldn’t be allowed to vote — a tenet of Wilson’s main church, Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho.

…

[Wilson] has referred to various women as “small-breasted biddies,” “lumberjack dykes” and “cunts” and extolled the “benefits” of slavery.

Who wouldn’t want men like that speaking on behalf of their entire household?
By the way, when Hegseth was asked directly if he supports the idea that women shouldn’t vote, his spokesperson sidestepped the question:

Women Rule reached out to Hegseth to ask if he supported his church’s belief that women should not vote or participate in government.

In response, Chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said in an emailed statement, “The Secretary is a proud member of a church affiliated with the Congregation of Reformed Evangelical Churches, which was founded by Pastor Doug Wilson. The Secretary very much appreciates many of Mr. Wilson’s writings and teachings.”

The correct answer was “no.”

Legally speaking, repealing the 19th Amendment isn’t going to happen—the barriers are too high—but you can already see support for moves that would have a similar effect. As the Brennan Center for Justice points out, the Republican-supported SAVE Act, which would require American citizens to show a passport or birth certificate to register to vote, could disenfranchise millions of women “whose married names aren’t on their birth certificates or passports.” They would “face extra steps just to make their voices heard.”

These Christians wouldn’t have a problem with that at all. If it means kicking more women off the voting rolls, well, so what? They shouldn’t be voting anyway. And what about women who are single? Widowed? What happens if they don’t have a man who can speak on their behalf? Well, they just need to go to the nearest penis in their lives.

Unmarried women, they suggested, could be represented by fathers, brothers or uncles. But in their ideal, women would be married, and only to men. (Gay couples have no place in this system.)

The assumption underlying this whole philosophy is that everyone in every household thinks alike and that every household is made up of the same parts—a father, mother, and some some Duggar Multiple of children. There’s no need for multiple votes from a family unit like that because they share a single brain cell. If you don’t think women should have any independent thoughts to begin with, I suppose that makes sense. That also creates a family structure that’s ripe for abuse; if a woman (or child) “disobeys,” the husband may feel entitled to force her into submission and the victims may feel like they deserve it.

But even though most married couples likely overlap in their values quite a bit, there may be significant differences… which any couple in a healthy relationship could tell you. The same could be said of their children. This patriarchal offshoot resembles the same mindset we saw with the quiverfull movement years ago, where conservative Christian parents believed they could just outbreed everyone else and take over everything within a few generations. They mistakenly believed their kids would be little Christian clones, ignoring the reality that children also have minds of their own.

Don’t worry, though. They have a solution to that when it comes to their wives. They want to ban no-fault divorce, making it harder for women to leave marriages even if they’re no longer in love or feel trapped.

If you follow people like Partridge, it can be hard to tell if they’re just trolling or really this insane. He has personally called for “household voting” in the same tweets where he says Muslims and Hindus should be banned from the country and only Christians should be allowed to hold elected office.

He has just as much disdain toward single men and childless couples—he doesn’t believe they should vote either. Basically, the only people who should be allowed to vote, in his mind, are people who look, think, and act like him. And who have enough money to buy property. He doesn’t say “white” on that list, but it’s certainly implied given our nation’s history. (Partridge has referred to the “Black crime problem” and “Jewish corruption problem,” in case there were any doubts about his other bigoted views.)

But here’s one thing these people will never do: put their money where their mouth is. They can talk about women not voting all they want, but it’s not like they’re going to lead by example. Their convictions are weak.

They could always start the process and feature the women in their churches ripping up their ballots and encouraging other Christian women to join them in the act, but they’re not about to do that because they’re less interested in stopping the women in their own churches from voting than stopping liberal women from voting altogether.

You’ve probably seen those maps showing what the electoral college results would be if only women voted, and they’re always overwhelmingly blue. That’s what scares these pathetic Christian men. They’re making up their own biblical rules to justify whatever might be most politically convenient for them.

If they wanted to urge conservative Christian women to stop voting, they would lead the charge. But they don’t actually care about their own wives voting because they understand the power in having twice as many conservative votes in their household. They just want to make it harder for other women to vote, and pointing to some biblical view is a much easier way for them to rationalize it to the outside world.

The fact is these men just want control because they can’t earn it any other way. They can’t earn respect so they force it upon their families. Their can’t convince people to adopt their views through conventional means so they pretend it’s biblical. If you removed the biblical language from everything they say, all you’re left with is a naked attempt to consolidate political power by shrinking the electorate.

The irony is that all of this would backfire spectacularly on conservative Christians. White evangelical women have been a reliable voting bloc for Republicans for years. Putting up barriers for women to vote wouldn’t work because you better believe liberal women would crash through walls to make sure their voices are heard while conservative women would convince themselves it’s for the best. Much like the dummymanders we’re seeing in some red states, by trying to rig the system, these people would actually be kneecapping their own movement.

These men can’t actually convince people outside their cult to accept a world where they’re taken seriously so they have to impose it within their own circles. They want to build a bubble where dissent of any kind, but especially from women, is structurally impossible.

It says a lot about Christian Nationalism more broadly. The only way their ideas can gain traction isn’t through a fair democratic process but through brute force. And suppressing the votes of those who might push back. If your utopian society requires half the population to be silent, submissive, and politically invisible, it’s worth asking what you’re so damn afraid of.

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