Why We Shouldn’t Ignore Pete Hegseth’s Retweet on Women’s Voting Rights

The idea that women should lose the right to vote is shaping up to be more than a crass punchline or a dystopian viewpoint, but one that Pete Hegseth, a member of the president’s cabinet, appears to agree with. It’s a moment all women need to take seriously, advocates say, no matter how extreme or far-fetched the idea seems.

Hegseth, one of the more drama-inducing members of Trump’s drama-filled cabinet, is making waves (again) for his support for a number of radical—and frankly, disgusting—claims a far-right pastor made about the role women should play in American society.

Late last week, Anderson Cooper 360 aired an interview that CNN’s Pamela Brown did with Doug Wilson, the head of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho. As Brown explains, Wilson has been teaching his extremist views for years but has recently been making inroads with some of the most powerful people in the country, including Hegseth, who she reported has been attending a church recently opened by Wilson in Washington, DC.

Wilson’s litany of outdated stances are numerous, but for starters, CNN reported he has said that he believes that abortion and homosexuality should be illegal, that women should “submit” to their husbands and be unable to vote, and that America should be ruled as a Christian theocracy.

When asked to defend his view on voting specifically by Brown, Wilson described women as “the kind of people that people come out of,” claiming that it takes no “talent to simply reproduce biologically.” Brown asked if this bizarre and confusing description of one half of the population should be taken to mean that Wilson believes having kids is the only purpose for women in the world, but he didn’t really elaborate. Okay, then!

Wilson and his fellow pastors, Jared Longshore and Toby Sumter, told Brown that they advocate for married men voting on behalf of their households.

“In my ideal society, we would vote as households and I would ordinarily be the one that would cast the vote, but I would cast the vote having discussed it with my household,” said Sumter. If the wife disagrees with the husband’s vote, he said, then they can have a “discussion” over that conflict, he added when pressed by Brown.

These views are apparently ideas that Hegseth supports. After the church’s publishing arm, Canon Press, posted a video of the interview, the secretary retweeted it on X, saying “All of Christ for All of Life,” the mission statement of Christ Church. And the Department of Defense, when asked by CNN, said that Hegseth “is a proud member of the network of churches founded by Pastor Wilson” and “very much appreciates many of Mr. Wilson’s writings and teachings.”

And Wilson, according to a video posted by The Tennessee Holler, is also taking Hegseth’s retweet as a show of agreement, saying that the secretary “didn’t just repost it, he reposted it and said amen.”