The 19th Amendment Is At Risk

Pondering Life, Old Age, and a Crazy World

by

Christy Thomas

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Special to United Methodist Insight | Sept. 28, 2025

You think this cartoon is an exaggeration? I wish it were . . .

This recent piece in the Wall Street Journal is an important article to read—you can access it here (free link). It’s about a formerly fringe pastor, Douglas Wilson (Pete Hegseth, Secretary of War, attends his church), whose impact is advancing rapidly and who advocates for a return to what he claims was a Christian nation at its founding.

Now, anyone who knows much about the history of the formation of what is now the United States knows that, while many of the first arrivals here would be named “Christian,” they were hardly of the same theological mindset as Wilson.

There is a reason for the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Our founders recognized the dangers of a state-ordained religious base to the nascent society and were having none of it.

However, Wilson is a strong proponent of what is known as “Christian Nationalism,” a growing and increasingly influential movement. It is on their philosophy that the so-called Project 2025 is founded. Piece by piece, the hopes and dreams of that document are making their way into the fabric of our society. Take a hard, hard look at the data on this site to see just how quickly many of those objectives have already been implemented.

And here is one of Wilson’s essential platforms:

One of Wilson’s core messages is that the Bible creates a hierarchy in society: Jesus is the lord of all domains, while in the home, women are subservient to men. Wilson believes the basic unit of democracy should be the household: Each household gets a vote, with the husband and father controlling the ballot.

At times, Wilson has used quips to deliver his view of firm gender roles: “Godly women are designed to make the sandwiches,” he wrote on his blog. He was more graphic in “Fidelity,” a book on sexuality and sin, where he wrote that “the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party: A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.”

When Roe vs Wade was overturned, I predicted that the 19th Amendment would be next. The repeal of Roe vs Wade has already ushered in a two-tiered medical system: only males now have the right to medical privacy. A woman’s womb has become everyone’s business; her right to medical privacy discarded onto the garbage heap.

Women also function under a two-tiered set of laws: limited governmental oversight if someone is a [white] male; extreme governmental oversight if someone is a female with a functioning womb.

My next prediction: police stationed at every exit point from “zero-abortion” states to check for possible pregnancies in case the person is headed toward a state where abortion is permitted. Every female of any age who could bear a child will have to yank her panties down or submit to a blood draw and wait for the result so some guy/pervert can check her out and see if she might possibly have an embryo inside.

Genitalia checks are soon going to be required in all government/school restrooms in the state of Texas. Again, the double standard: women will have to carry their birth certificates and show their genitalia to the bathroom monitors, who shall be tasked with making sure no transgender woman possibly enters that sacred space.

I seriously doubt that the males will have to show their equipment to answer their calls to nature.

Is this what we want for the USA? Is this really what we are about? Do we genuinely wish for a few white men who appear to be genuinely afraid of women and their collective power to use their rigid and extraordinarily unscholarly and often inaccurate interpretation of the Bible to make the rules we all have to follow—or risk imprisonment?

Sadly, the only way to stop this now is to sweep nearly all GOP officeholders out of office. I say “sadly” as the Democrats have their own problems with upholding a robust democracy, and any nation without a genuine dialogue between persons and parties holding strong beliefs on opposite sides of issues will fail.

Under the Trump regime—and I personally do not call this “GOP” anymore, but it is now the Trump Cult—that necessary dialogue with its vital compromises has now nearly or even completely disappeared. It did not have to happen, but, again sadly, gatekeepers abdicated their collective responsibility as elected officials out of fear of retribution.

And yes, Trump is a master of retribution. He and his loyalists are wreaking havoc on American norms of dialogue, compromise and civility.

I am in deep sympathy with those who are calling for a more moral and grounded society. I am also in deep sympathy with those who think that an ethical, gounded society has room for a wider group of people, for full rights for women, for an understanding that not everyone is born rigidly heterosexual, for an openness to the oppressed, for the migrants, for it is on the back of those very outcasts and dispossesed that this once-great nation has been built.

I beg you to take a few minutes and take in the words to this powerful hymn, “There’s a Wideness in God’s Mercy.”

God’s love is not narrow, not confined to a chosen few. It’s wide open—and having an open society is the only way even to begin to approach being a “Christian nation.” What is happening now is a deep, deep travesty and malignant twisting of the essential message of the Bible.

It needs to stop, and the only way to bring this to pass is at the voting booth. We cannot keep going in the current direction. And yes, if we don’t, women will not only lose the right to vote but also lose any hope of pain relief during childbirth—after all, that is what the Bible says.

Author and columnist the Rev. Dr. Christy Thomas is a retired clergy member of the former North Texas Annual Conference, now the Horizon Texas Conference of the United Methodist Church. This post is republished with permission from her Substack blog, "Pondering Life, Old Age, and a Crazy World."