Women Under Fire: The GOP's Radical Agenda to Penalize "Sinners"

That’s what’s really going on here: for the zealots in the most extreme parts of the forced birth movement — which has taken control of the GOP — it’s all about the punishment of women...

The punishment of Quakers Alice Ambrose, Mary Tompkins, and Anne Colemen, from “The Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier,” 1885.

The tale is one of an evil time,
When souls were fettered and thought was crime,
And heresy’s whisper above its breath
Meant shameful scouring and bonds and death!
—John Greenleaf Whittier, “How the Women Went from Dover”

Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and Project 2025 have some very specific plans for nationally resetting the legal status of half the American population, and they’re using religion and “sin” to justify their bizarre imposition of 18th century values.

They explicitly want to reverse the status of women’s legal, workplace, marital, and social equality and return to a time when biblical law dictated that men ran everything from the household to business to governance and law.

One key to women being able to play leadership and workplace roles has been their ability to regulate their own fertility, from access to birth control, the morning-after pill, and abortion.

By enforcing the Comstock Act — which is still on the books, as Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito, and numerous other Republicans keep reminding us — they will be able to ban the shipment of anything, from drugs to surgical devices, that can be used to produce an abortion. This could even end most hospital-based abortions by essentially outlawing the equipment needed to perform them.

As Project 2025 proclaims on p. 594 of their Mandate for Leadership for the next Republican administration:

“Announcing a Campaign to Enforce Criminal Prohibitions in 18 U.S. Code §§ 1461 and 1462 [the Comstock Act] Against Providers and Distributors of Abortion Pills That Use the Mail. Federal law [the Comstock Act] prohibits mailing ‘[e]very article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing which is advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for producing abortion.’ Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs, there is now no federal prohibition on the enforcement of this statute. The Department of Justice in the next conservative Administration should therefore announce its intent to enforce federal law….”

The second key is to give men the power to challenge women who want a divorce. As Senator JD Vance said in 2021:

“One of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace” is the idea that “these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy, and so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term”.

Republican legislators in Louisiana, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Texas have already proposed eliminating no-fault divorce in those states, and the trend is picking up steam among GOP politicians nationwide.

Multiple Project 2025 partners, including the powerful and influential American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which has helped introduce thousands of pieces of state and federal legislation, are explicit about this goal, as Media Matters for America noted:

“The American Legislative Exchange Council proposed a piece of legislation dubbed the “Marriage Contract Act,” which would have eliminated no-fault divorce. [Center for Media and Democracy, ALEC Exposed, 2/13/17]”

The consequences could be dramatic and deadly for women, as The Guardian recently explained:

“Between 1976 and 1985, states that passed the [no-fault divorce] laws saw their domestic violence rates against men and women fall by about 30%; the number of women murdered by an intimate partner declined by 10%; and female suicide rates declined by 8 to 16%.”

Republicans nationwide are calling for a reversal of the women’s rights movement dating all the way back to Abagail Adams’ imploring her husband John to “remember the ladies” at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 through today, and are not shy about it.

For example, Federal District Judge Michael Kacsmaryk, 46, was appointed to the federal bench by Donald Trump. A Republican activist and religious fundamentalist, he’s said that “so-called marriage equality” has put America “on a road to potential tyranny” and reflects a “complete abuse of rule of law principles.”

As The Washington Post noted, Kacsmaryk has argued that:

“The sexual revolution ushered in a world where an individual is ‘an autonomous blob of Silly Putty unconstrained by nature or biology’ and where ‘marriage, sexuality, gender identity and even the unborn child must yield to the erotic desires of liberated adults.’”

Kacsmaryk, the judge who tried to outlaw mifepristone nationally (which the Supreme Court will almost certainly decide on next year) is part of a substantial movement within the GOP to use religion to roll back the rights and status of women.

Because their “beliefs” are grounded in their religion and they believe that women who get abortions or use some types of birth control (IUDs, morning-after pills, etc.) are committing the ultimate sin, murder, they  want to see these sinning women suffer for their “crimes.”

Like people who love the death penalty (and in two states now state legislators have called for the death penalty for women who get abortions), they want to be able to torture them and watch them suffer; they want them to experience humiliation, and feel mortification for their sin of rejecting a pregnancy initiated by a man who was ordained by their god to be their master and the head of their household.

Torturing women for religious reasons is nothing new for American theological zealots.

Louise and I used to live just a short drive from Dover, New Hampshire, the fourth-largest city in the state, near the Maine border and the Atlantic seacoast. Generations ago, rightwing politicians and preachers were enforcing social control, much like the GOP’s forced birthers are trying to do today.

John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem “How the Women Went from Dover” tells the tale of three young women who dared to challenge that day’s most powerful religious men, that early generation of the people driving the most extreme parts of what today has morphed into the forced birth movement. 

Whittier’s poem begins:

The tossing spray of Cocheco’s fall
Hardened to ice on its rocky wall,
As through Dover town in the chill, gray dawn,
Three women passed, at the cart-tail drawn!

The three women were Anne Coleman, Mary Tomkins, and Alice Ambrose, and their crime was adhering to and promoting female-tolerant Quaker beliefs in a rabidly rightwing town.  

This so enraged the minister of Dover’s Congregational church, John Reyner, that he and church elder Reverend Hatevil Nutter (yes, that was his real name) lobbied the crown magistrate, Captain Richard Walderne, to have them punished for their challenge to Reyner’s and Nutter’s authority. 

It was a bitter New England winter when Walderne complied, ordering the three women stripped naked and tied to the back of a horse-drawn cart by their wrists, then dragged through town while receiving ten lashes each.

As Whittier wrote:

Bared to the waist, for the north wind’s grip
And keener sting of the constable’s whip,
The blood that followed each hissing blow
Froze as it sprinkled the winter snow.

A local man, George Bishop, wrote at the time what he witnessed:

“Deputy Waldron caused these women to be stripped naked from the middle upwards, and tied to a cart, and after a while cruelly whipped them, whilst the priest stood and looked and laughed at it.” 

It was a start, from Reverend Reyner’s point of view, but hardly enough to scare the women of the entire region from which he drew his congregation. So, he got the young women’s punishment extended to 11 nearby towns over 80 miles of snow-covered roads, all following the same routine. 

So into the forest they held their way,
By winding river and frost-rimmed bay,
Over wind-swept hills that felt the beat
Of the winter sea at their icy feet.

The next town was Hampton, where the constable decided that just baring them above the waist wasn’t enough. As Sewall’s History of the Quakers records:

“So he stripped them, and then stood trembling whip in hand, and so he did the execution. Then he carried them to Salisbury through the dirt and the snow half the leg deep; and here they were whipped again.” 

As Whittier wrote in his poem:

Once more the torturing whip was swung,
Once more keen lashes the bare flesh stung.
“Oh, spare! they are bleeding!” a little maid cried,
And covered her face the sight to hide.

Whipping, beating, stoning, hanging, nailing, being pilloried (publicly clamped to a post through neck and wrist holes, often naked and sometimes for days at a time), dragging, burning, branding, and dozens of other techniques were employed by religious and government authorities in the early American colonies to enforce religious thought and behavior, particularly against women. 

As Whittier wrote:

If her cry from the whipping-post and jail
Pierced sharp as the Kenite’s driven nail,
O woman, at ease in these happier days,
Forbear to judge of thy sister’s ways!

For the entirety of “civilized” human history — in country after country, culture after culture, religion after religion — crusaders for Zeus, Ra, Thor, Odin, Aphrodite, Venus, JHWH, Shiva, Rama, Krishna, Jesus, Quetzalcoatl, Mohamed, Ceridwen, Xpiacoc, Ishtar, and Amen (among hundreds of others) have, at various times, punished, tortured, and even killed women who refused to acknowledge their male gods and the rules of their patriarchal religious and political systems.

— Adherents to radical Islam from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan to The Philippines today require women to cover most all of their bodies, and delight in publicly whipping and even beheading females who won’t comply.

— Fundamentalist Hindus in India today burn women to death if they’ve defied religious authorities or the patriarchs of their families.

— For over 1000 years, Christian fundamentalists have — as Whittier documents — tortured, hung, impaled, and burned to death women who defied their male ministers’ religious mandates.

What we’re seeing today in these attempts to regulate women’s behavior by the GOP is a simple extension of religious fundamentalism and patriarchy that goes back as far as ancient Samaria.

This lust for domination is really about wielding political power under the guise of religion.

Again, this is nothing new. It’s an ancient story that keeps echoing through history and Trump, the GOP, and Project 2025 are committed to reviving.

Here in America today, it’s part of a larger war on “uppity women,” non-whites, non-fundamentalist-Christian people, and gender minorities.

Which is why it’s so clear that bringing back enforcement of the Comstock Act via Project 2025 is not about the safety of women. It’s not even about reducing the number of abortions.

It’s about control, power, and their assertion that an angry Christian god has told them they are uniquely suited to interpret his scripture in a political context. They, and they alone, can choose to embrace the punitive parts of Christianity and ignore the empathetic and loving parts of it.

Those sadists want to shame women who’ve rejected their religious beliefs and gone on to get abortions, seek divorces, or participate in the workplace or government. Who have defied their religiously-justified patriarchal political authority.

They want to publicly humiliate women, harass them, and teach them a lesson about who’s really in charge.

And, if the adjudicated rapist Donald Trump takes the White House this fall, they’ll be able to gleefully do it — like Reverend Nutter — under the sanction and protection of the law.