A bizarre, pro–Kamala Harris ad released by Vote Common Good dropped yesterday. Narrated by actress Julia Roberts, the ad encourages wives of Republican men to revolt against their husbands’ political ideologies at the ballot box.
“In the one place in America where women still have the right to choose, you can vote any way you want,” Roberts says, as two women who arrive at a polling center with their redneck husbands look at each other knowingly, their pens hovering uncertainly over the circle next to Donald Trump’s name. “And no one will ever know. Remember: What happens in the booth, stays in the booth.” The women then vote for Harris.
To assume that Republican wives need permission to vote is to assume that they lack autonomy or, worse, that marriage is an oppressive institution that systemically crushes a woman’s opinion. It’s 2024. Women are not pathetic, weak shells who need permission to think or act courageously (or at all), and to promote deception as the means of empowering women is a remarkably soulless strategy.
Vote Common Good is a progressive Evangelical organization. According to its website:
Many Evangelical and Catholic voters are experiencing a reckoning of their faith and feel called to oppose policies and approaches of division, racism, selfishness, cruelty, and exclusion. For many of these voters, their primary commitment is not to switch parties; it is to be faithful to their beliefs and convictions and make the common good their voting criteria.
And yet the organization is encouraging the betrayal of other Christian beliefs, such as that it is wrong to lie to one’s spouse.
Here we are, in the United States of America, where women are better off than anywhere else in the world, where women make up almost half of the civilian workforce, where college-educated women outnumber college-educated men, where more and more women are becoming the breadwinners of their households, and where women are the ones who bear future generations: It is an insult to suggest that American women lack freedom, the power of choice, or the ability to reason to guide their conscience.
There are no hordes of Republican husbands demanding their wives’ political submission. Spouses who vote similarly likely just share certain beliefs. What happened to traditional feminism, which, flawed as it became, praised and recognized a woman’s voice and autonomy?