Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth promotes repealing women’s right to vote

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who oversees about 3 million military service members and civilian employees, reposted a video last week advocating repealing the 19th Amendment, which guarantees women the right to vote. The video is an excerpt from CNN anchor Pamela Brown’s interview with Christian nationalist pastor Doug Wilson, who Brown reports believes “women shouldn’t be able to vote.”

Brown speaks to two pastors in Wilson’s Idaho church who agree with Wilson. “In my ideal society, we would vote as households,” pastor Toby Sumpter says. “And I would ordinarily be the one to cast the vote.” (This is the model also advocated by Wilson.) Pastor Jared Longshore says he supports the repeal of the 19th Amendment because “the current system is not good for humans.”

Hegseth is a member of a church that is part of Wilson’s network, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), in Tennessee. When a CREC branch recently opened in Washington, DC, Hegseth attended. Longshore delivered the sermon.

Hegseth’s response to the video — “All of Christ for All of Life” — is a Christian nationalist slogan used frequently by Wilson. It stands for the idea that Christianity should dominate all aspects of life, including government.

In response to media inquiries, the Pentagon reiterated Hegseth’s admiration for Wilson and his ideology. “The Secretary very much appreciates many of Mr. Wilson’s writings and teachings,” Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said.

Beyond repealing women’s voting rights, what are Wilson’s “writing and teachings”? Let’s review.

Wilson’s retrograde views on women go well beyond repealing voting rights. Wilson explicitly advocates for “patriarchy,” saying that it should be the view of “every biblical Christian.” Wilson says, “the wife is to follow the lead of her husband in all things.”

Wilson has referred to feminists as “small-breasted biddies” and other women who don’t meet his approval as “‘lumberjack dykes’ and ‘cunts.’“

In his 1999 book Fidelity: What It Means to Be a One-Woman Man, Wilson applies his patriarchal worldview of the topic to sex. “A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants,” Wilson writes, “A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.”

In Her Hand in Marriage: Biblical Courtship in the Modern World, which Wilson published in 1997, he writes that “[w]omen inescapably need godly masculine protection against ungodly masculine harassment.” Women who refuse such “masculine protection,” Wilson asserts, “are really women who tacitly agree on the propriety of rape.”

According to Wilson’s 2012 book, Reforming Marriage: Gospel Living for Couples, a husband must assume “lordship in the home.” That involves the wife submitting to the husband’s views on all matters, including “spending habits, television viewing habits, weight, rejection of his leadership, laziness in cleaning the house, lack of responsiveness to sexual advances.” To achieve this, a man must “outline clear expectations, and repeatedly point out her failures.” If a wife does not comply, Wilson says the man should report her to the church elders.

Hegseth’s nomination was nearly derailed over allegations that he engaged in sexual abuse, including the revelation that “he paid $50,000 as part of a confidentiality agreement to a woman who alleged he sexually assaulted her.” The settlement “included a confidentiality clause.” In another incident, “[a] California woman told police that Trump Cabinet pick Pete Hegseth physically blocked her from leaving a hotel room, took her phone, and then sexually assaulted her even though she ‘remembered saying ‘no’ a lot.'”

Hegseth was never criminally charged and denied the allegations.