'This isn't mere idle chatter': Inside MAGA's plan to 'bring Republican women to heel'

26 February

During the 2024 presidential race, progressive filmmaker/activist Michael Moore predicted that female voters — furious over draconian anti-abortion laws and the MAGA movement's overt misogyny — would give Democratic nominee Kamala Harris a decisive victory. But Donald Trump defeated Harris by roughly 1.5 percent in the popular vote (according to the Cook Political Report), and receiving 53 percent of the female vote wasn't enough to get Harris past the finish line.

Salon's Amanda Marcotte, over the years, has often stressed that when GOP women cater to "misogyny," that doesn't mean that GOP men will respect them. And in an article published on February 26, she argues that this disrespect is evident during Trump's second presidency.

"Forty-five percent of female voters backed Trump in 2024, despite his overt misogyny," Marcotte explains. "Most, no doubt, believed that complicity would protect them and that the attacks would be centered on other women. But while the GOP certainly wants to strip liberal and feminist women of their rights, male MAGA leaders are showing increasing interest in bringing Republican women to heel, both culturally and through the force of law. After all, they are more likely to live and work with Republican women. If they want to feel the full flowering of male domination, it's Republican women they need to see submitting."

Marcotte cites specific examples, noting that Christian nationalists, including Pastor Joel Webbon, are pushing to oust right-wing activist Kristan Hawkins as head of a student anti-abortion group.

"It started after she objected to Republican legislators introducing bills to charge women who get abortions with murder — an extreme move she fears will backfire on the movement," Marcotte observes. "But mostly, it was about growing male anger on the Christian Right that women are allowed leadership positions at all."

Webbon and the TheoBros movement, Marcotte adds, are "clamoring more loudly, in recent months, about their wish to strip women, especially their own wives, of the right to vote." And according to The New Republic's Sarah Stankorb, more and more Christian nationalists are calling for the repeal of the U.S. Constitution's 19th Amendment.

"This isn't mere idle chatter, either," Marcotte warns. "House Republicans passed a bill, which stalled in the Senate, this session to require citizens to have a passport or birth certificate matching their name to vote. This would be a back-door ban on voting for any woman who took her husband's last name and doesn't have a passport — an estimated 69 million women. It would also disproportionately affect Republican women, who are more likely to be married, more likely to have changed their name and less likely to have a passport."

Marcotte continues, "Similarly, there's been a slowly rising volume on the right of talk about banning no-fault divorce, fueled by Republicans like Vice President JD Vance saying it's too easy for women — even those in abusive marriages — to leave their marriages."

The Salon journalist argues that "Republican women are fools" if they believe that an "increasingly misogynist MAGA movement" will spare them.

"On the contrary, because Republican women tend to be in closer proximity to Republican men," Marcotte warns, "they're far more likely to be on the receiving end of anger over talkback or other perceived insubordination."

Amanda Marcotte's full article for Salon is available at this link.

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