Your Last Vote in the American Theocracy

There are no elections in a patriarchal theocracy

The men knew the 2000 election could be close. Because it could come down to narrow numbers, they were debating letting the wives vote.

I heard this from my husband, who’d decided we now practiced Head of Household voting shortly after he read it on “Doug’s Blog,” a blog written by popular homeschool vendor Doug Phillips. And just like that, my right to vote was gone.

I clung to the rationalizations my mentors parroted to me. We were busy women nurturing our families. It would be wrong to cast a vote differently than our husband and usurp his headship. Politics were probably rigged. We rarely left the house as it was—no one really wanted to stand in line with our ducks in a row behind us, earning stares for being “those strange homeschoolers.”

Secretly, I was mad, because I cared about politics and the direction of our country. But showing irritation and anger was forbidden and dangerous. So, I tried not to think about it and got on with my day, legitimately full of diapers, laundry, babies, lessons, and cooking in an endless rhythm that defined my days.

The tight race between George W. Bush and Al Gore had the patriarchs concerned about the popular vote in key states. We lived in Florida, a swing state. But my husband didn’t like Bush any more than he liked Gore. He wanted to vote for Pat Buchanan, and a third party candidate definitely needed all the votes he could get.

He was thinking about it.

My reel explaining how my fundamentalist mentors supported the mens’ decisions on how, when, and if women would vote. We claimed a variety of rationalizations to help us submit to a freedom we should have had protected as citizens.