stop worrying about the 19th Amendment
and start worrying about the SAVE America Act.
A certain subset of Christian nationalist influencers (what else am I supposed to call these guys who spend their days posting on X? what do they even do?) have started routinely posting that the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote, should be repealed.
Christian nationalists like Doug Wilson have been peddling the notion of the “household vote” for years, which is the idea that only the (predominantly male) heads of households should have the right to vote (Wilson has offered that if a single woman should be the head of her own household, then she can vote — but of course in Wilson’s ideal world, a single woman is an anomaly).
Open calls for the repeal of the 19th Amendment aren’t exactly new. These calls are clickbait, intentional provocations. They aren’t worth fighting about in the comments section (as few things are).
Repealing the 19th amendment is not the “Christian position,” whatever Joel Webbon might say. It is, as Helen Roy puts it, a luxury belief. It’s deeply, wildly off-putting to regular people who don’t spend their time chronically online. It will also never happen. If the ever-intensifying extreme end of the Christian right wants to embrace this belief and let it define them, I say: go for it, champ.
If you want to worry about an attack on women’s voting rights, take a closer look at the SAVE America Act.
The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act (an updated version of last year’s SAVE Act) is sponsored by House Representative Chip Roy, a member of the House Freedom Caucus and founder of the “Sharia-Free America Caucus,” which (I guess?) is supposed to save America from Sharia law.
Roy seems fond of offering up solutions to problems that do not actually exist, as just 0.04% of voter verification cases are indeed confirmed as non-citizens. “Some wrongly claim the SAVE Act is a solution in search of a problem, but noncitizens are indeed voting in our federal elections,” Roy wrote in an op-ed defending his proposed legislation. “Last year, Ohio’s grand juries indicted six people for illegally voting.” Stop the presses! What Roy fails to mention is that these six people indicted were green-card holders who seemed to (mistakenly, but still) believe that they did have the right to vote. Moreover, they were indicted, as non-citizens voting is already illegal. The system working as it ought, no?
There are two things we should establish about the SAVE America Act. First, it is very unlikely to pass the Senate (although there has been talk of an executive order to implement its requirements if the legislative path fails, and legislation like this has a habit of coming back around). Second, its supporters have been defending the SAVE America Act by insisting that it isn’t a “soft repeal” of women’s voting rights (my “this bill doesn’t strip women of the right to vote” t-shirt has people asking a lot of questions answered by my shirt, if you will).
One of the most common criticisms of the SAVE America Act is that it requires voters to prove their U.S. citizenship before registering to vote with particular documents: a birth certificate, a U.S. passport, naturalization paperwork, and only Real IDs that indicate citizenship (which would not include driver’s licenses, the most common form of photo identification, in all but six states). If a married woman (or a person who has otherwise changed their name) does not live in one of these six states, then she would need an active passport with her new last name or a birth certificate showing her new last name. Otherwise, she cannot register to vote. That does indeed mean that up to 69 million women who have taken their spouse’s last name do not have a birth certificate matching their legal name (and over 140 million American citizens simply do not have a passport).
“Married women who have changed their name and already registered to vote — millions, mind you — are utterly unaffected by the SAVE Act,” Roy blusters in defense. “The so-called ‘69 million married women’ figure is a statistical sleight of hand meant to purposefully ignite fear and conveniently glosses over this critical fact.”
But what Roy fails to mention is that the SAVE America Act would also mandate the regular and frequent purging of voter rolls, ensuring that even married women (and other women who have otherwise changed their names) would be required to re-register and consequently encounter difficulty. Take Kansas as an example. After the state adopted a requirement to prove citizenship before registering to vote, 31,000 eligible citizens were prevented from registering (12% of all applicants). Before Kansas adopted this requirement, noncitizen registration accounted for only 0.002% of registered voters in the state.
Well, that all doesn’t sound very democratic, you might think. You would be right, but this isn’t a winning argument if you’re coming up against the Christian nationalist element of the right. After last year’s No Kings protests, Chip Roy went on a rant. “The truth is, the Marxists, the radicals, and the Islamists the Democratic Party promoted this weekend, they cannot handle the truth,” he wrote. “And the truth is that there is a king, and that king is Jesus. And the president has been willing to say it. His administration has been willing to say it.”
Who needs a democracy when you have a king? If you are a Christian nationalist, Jesus’ kingdom is of this world. In fact, it is of this country and this particular political party. Convenient, don’t you think?
The Joel Webbons and Dale Partridges of the world will continue to spew misogynistic rhetoric disguised as concern for the wellbeing of (white, western, Christian) America in the form of these “repeal the 19th” posts. Don’t engage them, don’t give them your emotional energy. Let them continue to alienate themselves and exist in their shrinking echo chamber.
The real danger lies in the threats to the 19th Amendment that insist they’re nothing to see.