Richmond, Virginia—August 26th marked Women’s Equality Day, the national day to honor the certification of the 19th Amendment and subsequent establishment of white women’s suffrage. That evening, the Trump administration sent out a “presidential message” stating that “every American citizen is created in the holy image of God” and indicating their “commit[ment] to protecting the blessings of liberty” without ever acknowledging that women having the right to vote was a good thing. 

Meanwhile, the US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been demonstrating his commitment to liberty by amplifying right-wing pastors who advocate stripping women of the right to vote.(Hegseth is a member of a church affiliated with the denomination of the pastors in the video he shared and captioned his retweet of the video, “All of Christ for All Of Life.”) 

Over in Congress, the Senate is currently poised to pass the SAVE Act (passed by the House in April), which would make it more difficult for many communities to register to vote, particularly women who changed their name at marriage and cannot produce, in some cases, decades of paperwork to verify their existence with state boards of election.

“The 19th Amendment has been the law of the land for 105 years, and Women’s Equality Day should be a time to honor our victories and our progress,” said LaTwyla Mathias, Executive Director of Progress Virginia. “Instead, we’re watching leaders in Washington try to roll back our most fundamental rights. From lawmakers pushing the SAVE Act to extremist voices in the cabinet openly questioning whether women should vote at all, it’s clear that this administration is happy to jettison the right to vote along with the rest of our rights and liberties. This is a coordinated effort to silence women, especially women of color, by making it harder to access the ballot box: it’s not just rhetoric by facile and undisciplined men.  We cannot allow our rights to be rolled back under the guise of ‘election integrity,’ and we will not overlook it when cabinet members muse about eliminating our right to vote in their attempts to normalize Christian nationalism.”