The good news is, the defense secretary’s spokesperson said he supports a woman’s right to vote. The bad news is they had to clarify in the first place.
Under normal circumstances, no one would think to ask the Pentagon whether the current secretary of defense supports women’s voting rights, but there’s little about our current political landscape that’s “normal.” Hence, The Hill reported:
The Trump administration on Thursday sought to clarify Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s support for women’s voting rights following controversy spurred by his repost of a video tied to a pastor who said the opposite. ‘Of course, the secretary thinks that women should have the right to vote. That’s a stupid question,’ Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson told reporters during Thursday’s briefing.
I can appreciate why the DOD’s right-wing spokesperson — someone who, as Politico reported earlier this year, “has touted antisemitic views, white supremacist conspiracy theories and Kremlin-like statements on social media” — would be eager to dismiss the line of inquiry. But it really wasn’t that stupid a question.
In fact, it was just two weeks ago when Hegseth used his social media account to amplify a video about a Christian nationalist church that included various pastors saying women should no longer be allowed to vote. The Associated Press reported:
In the post, Hegseth commented on an almost seven-minute-long report by CNN examining Doug Wilson, cofounder of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, or CREC. The report featured a pastor from Wilson’s church advocating the repeal of women’s right to vote from the Constitution, and another pastor saying that in his ideal world, people would vote as households. It also featured a female congregant saying that she submits to her husband.
Hegseth didn’t explicitly endorse the idea of repealing voting rights for American women, but he also didn’t make any effort to distance himself from the rhetoric used in the video he shared with his online followers. On the contrary, he promoted the video, alongside his own written message that read, “All of Christ for All of Life.”
When this sparked a controversy, the former Fox News host could’ve made it clear that he disagreed with the comments, or that he supports leaving the 19th Amendment intact. Instead, Hegseth said nothing.
What’s more, the secretary’s office didn’t make much of an effort, either. When asked about the video he promoted, a Pentagon spokesperson told the AP that Hegseth is “a proud member of a church” that is affiliated with CREC and he “very much appreciates many of Mr. Wilson’s writings and teachings.”
All of this, of course, came on the heels of Hegseth’s efforts to purge several women from leadership posts within the U.S. armed forces.
Hopefully, what the Pentagon spokesperson said was accurate, and the secretary doesn’t actually support rolling back women’s voting rights, despite the content of the video he amplified online. But to see this question as somehow out of bounds given the broader context is difficult to take seriously.
