Reign of Error: Birth Control, Bathrooms & Biblical Patriarchy: The War on Gender and Reproduction

Sarah P.: Last week, transgender Kansans received a letter from the state's division of vehicles notifying them that their driver's licenses were invalid, effective immediately, while other Republican led states have barred residents from changing the gender markers on their driver's licenses. Kansas is the first state to enact a law retroactively invalidating licenses that were changed to accurately reflect their holder's gender identity. The new Kansas law also reverts all birth certificates altered under previous law, allowing a change in gender marker back to the sex assigned at birth. The new law also bars anyone from using a bathroom that doesn't match their sex assigned at birth in any government building, and even creates a private right of action for damages for any person who sees someone using the wrong bathroom. Imagine somebody suing you because they think you are in the wrong restroom while, for example, you are serving on jury duty. Kansas is not alone among red states that are accelerating their assaults on transgender rights and even existence, following the groundwork laid in state houses for over a decade with bans on bathroom use sports and gender affirming care, these Republican legislators, driven by a supposedly biblical view of God ordained gender roles, have become even more emboldened under Trump, who has created a presidential permission structure for them through executive orders like defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the federal government and ending radical indoctrination in K through 12 schooling, their effort to eradicate what they call gender ideology is just one part of the increasingly fanatical gender politics of the Trump era, a toxic brew of Christian nationalist patriarchy, ethno natalist ambitions, anti abortion, extremism, manosphere, esthetics and the seemingly crunchy politics of Robert F Kennedy Jr's make America healthy again, or Maha movement in last week's confirmation hearing For Trump, nominee, Casey means to be the nation's top doctor, the Surgeon General of the United States. We saw some of these bizarro politics in a Senate hearing room, among other things, means has denounced birth control pills as disrespect for life, and has promoted the claim that the reason for infertility is that one's cells cannot cope with the stresses of modern life, which are channeling precious biochemical resources towards defense and repair and away from thriving and fertility. In an odd twist, though, after the hearing, one Christian Right influencer denounced means as a practitioner of witchcraft. This week, a journalist with deep insight into the Christian right, Maga and Maha will help us soar through the escalating madness of GOP efforts to control sex, gender and reproduction.

Welcome to Reign of Error. I'm your host, Sarah Posner, an investigative journalist who has spent decades covering the Christian right. This is the podcast where we break down the latest news headlines about religion and politics with deep analysis by scholars, journalists and other experts. Today, I'm speaking with the journalist Sarah Jones, an award winning senior writer for New York Magazine, where she covers religion and national politics. Sarah, welcome to Reign of Error.

Sarah Jones: Thanks for having me.

Sarah P.: So let's start with the latest news in Kansas, this anti trans law that passed with a Republican super majority overriding the democratic governor's veto. I want to dig in here about the sponsor of the bill, a representative named Susan Humphries. She's a Republican who is an alumna of something called the Statesman Academy, which is a project of focus on the family's political arm, the Family Policy Alliance. They train state legislators to enact what they consider to be Christian legislation across the country. They helped spearhead the Arkansas ban on gender affirming care in 2022 that really set off the bans on gender affirming care around the country, which the Supreme Court ultimately upheld in the scremetti case. So they're definitely motivated by these religious ideas about sex and gender, but they also try to make it seem like this is just a common sense solution to a problem that they've invented. But let's take a listen to her speaking with John Whitmer, who's a former state rep in Kansas, who now has a podcast.

John Whitmer [Clip]: What started this whole thing was reversing back to the point where now on state issue IDs, you're gonna have to have your driver's license reflect your sex at birth, which is very important if you're dealing with identity, I mean, because otherwise you're opening the state up for liability and other issues, right?

Susan Humphries [Clip]: Yes, and in the committee, when we had the testimony about that piece of the bill, that's what it was about, was law enforcement, medical emergencies, they need to know what is the biological sex of this person that they're dealing with because of decisions that they're going to make and so on, and so that we've got to go back to what the birth certificate says and not on the driver's license.

Sarah P.: So this is obviously just BS cover for the Animus behind this bill. Why do you think they have to make up this sort of phony reason as to why your driver's license really has to have a gender marker that matches your sex assigned at birth?

Sarah J.: I think they're aware, to a very superficial extent that not everyone in the country shares their kind of religious or spiritual convictions when it comes to gender identity. So that's part of it. But I also I see this almost as apologetics. I mean, in the very traditional Christian sense, like, if you're at all familiar with the debates between people who believe in six day creation versus people who don't believe in six day creation. You know, they kind of put forward all these sorts of superficially very scientific and sort of common sense reasons why evolution can't be true. And that sounds like it's not related to what's going on, but I do think it's sort of the same tactic that this is just common sense. And during the anti gay marriage faction of things and the anti marriage equality faction of things, you would hear that a lot, that you know, it's just common sense. Kids need a mother and a father. This is just biology. And so they've been working up to this for a while. And I do think that this sort of rhetorical flourish like this is just about practicality. You know, this is about actually helping you be healthier and protecting you is very familiar. And I also think in particular, when we're thinking about trans rights, they see it as a wedge issue, and in a way that I don't know was ever quite true for some of like these previous cultural war flash points, you can kind of look at what's been coming out of some liberal centrist pundits when it comes to trans rights and gender affirming care. And to be quite frank with you, they sound a lot like any pastor I would have heard kind of growing up in evangelicalism when it comes to certain issues, you know, well, it's just common sense that, you know, you wouldn't approve this for minors. And so I do think that that sense of it being a wedge issue, a way for them to reclaim some territory in the public sphere, is very important to them. And I do think you know that there is a strategy here, and I think that's very important to understand that these people are very religious, some of them fanatically so. But there is a strategy here. There is a rational approach to the way that they're doing things, and it's very considered, and I think that you're seeing that manifest in a very specific way here.

Sarah P.: I mean, I think that the Supreme Court on Monday might have given away the game a little bit because it ruled in a case, you know, Shadow docket again, or pre merits docket, a case in California where Christian parents had challenged a law that protected the privacy of kids who had come out as trans at school at public school, so that you know their teacher did not have to tell their parents. And the parents who sued here argued that it violated their religious beliefs for parents not to be told that their kid was transitioning at school, say, by using different pronouns or having a different name, the parents who assert a free exercise claim have sincere religious beliefs about sex and gender, the majority wrote, and they feel a religious obligation to raise their children in accordance with these beliefs. So, you know, the Supreme Court has acknowledged that this is actually a religious motivation here. So I wanted to return to the to the Humphreys interview with John Whitmer, because later in the interview, I think they really sort of descend into some more direct anti trans animus here. And in this clip, they're going to talk about Abby Boatman, who is another state rep in Kansas. She's a trans colleague of Humphrey's in the state house, and Boatman is an Air Force vet who has said she wants other transgender Kansans to understand that they're not the only one. And so let's take a listen to Representative Humphries and Whitmer talk about this law and about Boatman.

John Whitmer [Clip]: You can identify as whatever you want. The analogy I use is, you know, the right now, the Kansas City Chiefs, for example, they need a quarterback because Patrick Mahomes is hurt. I can throw on pads and a helmet. I'm still not going to be the Chiefs quarterback. Your guy, Abi Boatman, whatever his name is, I think that's right. Abi Boatman. I mean, he can put on a dress and high heeled shoes. It doesn't change the fact that he's a he. I'm sorry. It just is what it is. But at any rate, I do want to come back to you. You really handled yourself professionally with the quorum. It was hard work. And so just know that we were watching you. We were holding you up in prayer.

Susan Humphries [Clip]: I could tell, and I so appreciate that.

Sarah P.: So here we have these two misgendering Humphrey's colleague making fun of the fact that she's transgender, refusing to call her a woman, calling her a guy. And then Whitmer tells Humphries, you know, I want you to know we were holding you up in prayer. Unpack this, for people who are unfamiliar with this kind of language and this kind of sentiment, when you're talking about watching a Christian legislator promote a bill like this.

Sarah J.: It's very easy to sort of comprehend when you put it in terms of spiritual warfare, and that idea can mean different things to different Christians, sort of depending on their denominational affiliation or their individual beliefs. But in the Christian right, what I have often seen is it's this very sort of stark contrast between the forces of Satan, which are fighting the forces of good, the forces of Christ. And so when I hear this talk of, oh, we were lifting you up in prayer, I really think that's specifically what's going on, that they see this as an example of spiritual warfare, where this Christian legislator is standing up for biblical truth, and they would say scientific or biological truth at the same time. By misgendering that legislator and being cruel, they probably wouldn't even think of it or admit to it as being cruel to you, although I do think that they enjoy that part as well. That's initially what comes to my mind, like she needs that spiritual support as she stands up for what is obvious and what is right and carries our agenda forward through the legislator. When we see that concept play out in the political sphere, particularly, it's really about reminding their political and religious foes of their place, keeping them in line. It's very hierarchical. It's sort of tied to this whole eschatology that's very vengeful and very vindictive. And it is this idea that, you know, we may be in warfare now, but eventually we will have dominion. We will win.

Sarah P.: So this assault on trans rights is also happening at the federal level, and not just Trump's executive orders. But, you know, the executive orders definitely guide all of this. You know, we had the Supreme Court case that we just talked about, that just came out on Monday, and last week, Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense, while he was supposedly, I guess, planning a war also took some time out to berate scouting America, formerly Boy Scouts, for being too DEI and forcing them to modify some of their policies, although the organization did say that they're still going to accept trans members. And then the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued an opinion that basically allows federal agencies to institute their own bathroom bounds in federal buildings. So you know, if you work at the Department of Agriculture and you're trans and the Secretary of Agriculture decides that you have to use the bathroom associated with the sex assigned at birth on your birth certificate, they can do that now, according to the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission. The Christian right is having a field day with the trans issues. Every day you feel like there's another thing.

Sarah J.: Yeah, it's been extremely successful for them, and I think for a few different reasons we are talking in most cases anyway, I think about fairly sophisticated political actors who have been at this for decades, and it's sort of the war against trans rights kind of sits on top all these other efforts anti marriage equality, which, by the way, they just sort of went to regroup, like they didn't stop opposing marriage equality. You know, they just took a breather and kind of pivoted, I think, to trans rights. And I think they're going to come back around to marriage eventually, probably in the near future. And so they've kind of been honing their strategies, I think over time, they see trans rights, we've talked about it being a wedge issue, and it is that, but it's also so central to the way that they view gender as sort of immutable, so it's fixed at birth. And not only that, but it, you know, being a man versus being a woman, that can only mean something very specific in both cases. And I'm glad that we're talking about Pete Hegseth, because if you've read any of his ghost written books, or, frankly, just listen to him talk, then you know that this is a big obsession for him, and the way that he talks about masculinity, and sort of his ideal masculinity in particular is very specific, very aggressive. And we're also talking about someone who's had allegations of sexual assault, domestic abuse, alcohol abuse, which I don't think is coincidental here, and how he sets that in contrast with femininity. And, you know, women don't belong in combat roles, for example, it's just contrary to their essential, really biological, again, nature.

Sarah P.: His religious mentor doesn't think women should vote.

Sarah J.: Correct. Doug Wilson is so extreme on this issue, and has been for as long as he's been in public life, which is a very long time, and he takes it to an extreme that not even I heard kind of growing up around a lot of this, and so I think that's why trans rights is such an obsession.

Sarah P.: So they feel threatened that their masculinity is threatened by the existence of trans people.

Sarah J.: I don't like to psychoanalyze, but I do think for somebody like Hegseth, his whole thing is very on the surface, right? I do think that is part of it. It threatens their conception of who they see themselves and understand themselves to be, but they also see it as like this is in the Bible. It's very core to their religious convictions. And I mean, that's a very old staple of the Christian right and evangelicalism and fundamentalism, in particular, this idea that a very kind of strict, very narrowly defined gender roles. And like I said, I really do think it is about reminding people to stay in their place. So if a man, from their perspective, can transition, what then does it mean to be a man. And also, I think they struggle like if you really think masculinity is sort of your open door to power in the home and the church and in society, I think on a very deep level, they find it repulsive, almost. I think it's very hard for them to grasp why would you give that up? They see it as a threat, perhaps not just to their conception of masculinity and how they think of themselves, but in a very real and material sense, their power. And if a woman, for example, can transition or just simply be as they would see it, maybe a little aggressive, maybe a little independent, they would see those as masculine qualities, whether or not she thinks of herself in that way or not, and that threatens their position as well. So I really do think this is about keeping themselves kind of at the top of the heap, and they understand correctly, in my view, that if gender is perhaps not what they say it is, if it is a spectrum, or if it is more flexible, then that hierarchy really doesn't make sense, right? You know, it's not common sense. It might not be biological reality. And if it's not biological reality, how can it be biblical reality? Like it's a very existential threat.

Sarah P.: You brought up marriage equality, and I think that, you know, they talked about Obergefell, which was handed down in 2015 they talked about it being their next Roe, that even if it took an intergenerational fight many decades, chipping away at it until finally you get the decision that gets rid of it entirely. You know, took them almost 50 years from Roe to Dobbs. So they're thinking about Obergefell that way. And I think you're right. They've sort of back burnered directly attacking Obergefell for the moment, but I think all of this anti woke, anti DEI and anti trans stuff is part of that anti Roe like strategy where you gradually change people's perception of what this is. Adopting the pro life label was something they used so effectively for so many years against Roe. And similarly here, I think that they're trying to use that this is just common sense. This is just biology. In the same way that they use the pro life, this is just obviously a good thing, and we're not driven by religion.

Sarah J.: Yes, I think it's very much the same strategy and kind of the same underlying convictions. We've kind of seen organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom create these so called discrimination cases where a vendor, say, a calligrapher, florist, a baker refuses to serve a same sex couple, and chipping away at anti discrimination ordinances in that fashion. So they've been working at it for a while, and I think the anti trans stuff is definitely part and parcel of it.

Sarah P.: Yeah, it's part of it. It's in that same strategy of, we're gonna chip away here, we're going to chip away there. We're going to talk about what seems obvious, like, Okay, well, why should a Christian florist have to work for a same sex couple? Right? That's just common sense. I mean, it's exactly what we're talking about. So I do think that that's next. And obviously nothing is inevitable. And I definitely don't want to say they're definitely going to win when it comes to sort of chipping away at marriage equality, the way they did with Roe. And the fight for abortion rights isn't finished either. So I don't want to be a Doomer, I guess is what I'm saying, but I do think it's a very serious concern. And of course, LGBT people have been sounding the alarm on that for a really long time.

Talking about abortion, I feel like since Dobbs, they've become more overt about their desire to punish women who have abortions. I think that the rhetoric around Dobbs and the overturn of Roe was, well, we just want to punish the doctors or the prescribers, but not the women. We want to save the women. We don't want to punish the women. But we've seen recently a bill, for example, in Tennessee, which, you know, hasn't passed and probably won't, but just the intention is there allowing for the death penalty for a woman who has an abortion, and that bill was endorsed by the president of the Southern Baptist Convention and then in another arena, but sort of the same sort of thing. Susan Rinkunas has a piece in Balls and Strikes about how prosecutors around the country are charging women with homicide in states that have criminalized abortion by mifepristone. The penalty is supposed to be, I guess, on the doctor, but a lot of women are actually being prosecuted. So can you talk about how the punishment, the idea of punishing the woman, is also central here to the theology or the religious thinking?

Sarah J.: It's absolutely central. So when we're thinking about these prosecutions or this proposal in Tennessee, they're taking that theological position that abortion is murder, and I think they're sort of taking it to a very logical conclusion. If it is murder, well, we punish murderers and we punish accessories to murder. So why wouldn't you arrest a woman who's violated the law in this way? Consider how extreme that position is, that abortion is murder in every instance. When you believe something that extreme, these are the material consequences for women in the United States. But it is very central, I think, to the view that women are never the top of this hierarchy that belongs to men. Women are the weaker vessel. Women are to submit. And I'm speaking specifically from an evangelical Protestant view. But I don't think that even when you get outside that tradition, you will find that idea just maybe explained or justified in different ways. So women in my tradition couldn't preach, and that doesn't sound like it should be relevant, but when I realized I had a sort of a problem with that, it was because there was this implication that women couldn't interpret the Bible effectively, or that we just didn't know our own mind in a specific way that we somehow lacked the intellectual or emotional capacity to have any sort of spiritual authority. And when we're talking about abortion, I do really think that matters, because it is just not trusting women to understand their situations correctly and to make the right choices for themselves, for their families, and so it needs to be made for them.

Sarah P.: So how does all of this figure into natalism? You know, which is definitely a big thing in Maga, sort of ethno natalism. You've written about natalism and sort of an obsession with fertility at the National conservatism conference back in 2024 I think it was.

Sarah J.: Yes.

Sarah P.: How does the natalism and fertility discussion cut across both evangelicalism and the Nat con world? Not that there's not overlap between these two movements. Obviously there is. But I think they are sort of seen as two different distinct movements. But they, you know, they might have some tensions between them on certain policy things, but I think here, there's some overlap on, you know, masculinity and the role of women and promoting natalism in our political culture.

Sarah J.: Pro natalism is an interesting example, because there are some sort of divisions within it. So like there are secular pronatalists. Elon Musk, for example, comes out a lot in conversations about pronatalism. And he's not a religious person. What he does have in common, I think, with pronatalists who are coming from a religious perspective and where they overlap, in turn, with the Nat con priority, it has everything to do with racism, with fear of democratic decline. And Musk, for example, is very open about that at this point. Yeah, he's very open. I mean, none of these people are really hiding it, to be clear. And so I think if you really distill where pronatalism overlaps with Nat con, I think that's there because we're talking about in terms of Nat con, you know, very immigration restrictionist, for example. And that's always had roots in eugenics movement, for example, going back, I mean, as far back as you want to go. And so I think that's a real sort of animating concern is racial purity, racial hygiene. And as we know from history, including the darkest moments in world history, women are central to that. White women in particular, and they have this very important, if somewhat limited function, which is to reproduce. And it doesn't mean that women can't hold positions of public authority, whether that's in the Nat con world or the pronatalist moral impact. They very often do, but it's a very specific role, which we've seen a lot when it comes to conservative women, which is encouraging women to go home, to focus on their kids, to have as many kids as possible. And that is sort of their highest calling, or their most important role. And that is, again, where you see this Venn diagram overlap. The overarching ideology is really only sustainable if women do what they're told, which is to have babies. That's really it, right?

Sarah P.: So speaking of women and fertility and birth control, last week, the Senate Health, Education Labor and Pensions Committee held a confirmation hearing for Casey Means to be Surgeon General, which is basically the nation's top doctor, and she's a figure in Maha, Make America Healthy Again movement. But she's caused some consternation in some other corners of Maga, even, you know, including the Christian right, even though, on the surface they might have some agreements, like her opposition to birth control pills. Let's take a listen to Senator Patty Murray of Washington questioning Means last week.

Senator Patty Murray [Clip]: You called birth control pills, and I'm going to quote, a disrespect of life. And you said, Americans quote, use birth control pills like candy. You also claimed, contrary to established science, that hormonal birth control has, quote, horrifying health risks for women. Now here are the facts. There are 18 FDA approved contraceptive methods, both hormonal and non hormonal, and there are decades, decades of evidence showing that every one of these birth control methods is safe and effective. So I wanted to ask you, help me understand, should women trust the FDA, which approved all 18 methods of birth control after a very rigorous look at the evidence, or should they trust your statement that there are horrifying health risks to birth control which contradicts that evidence?

Casey Means [Clip]: Thank you, Senator Murray, for your question. I'm curious if you're aware of what the side effects of hormonal contraception are.

Sarah P.: So her confirmation prospects are a little unclear. Some of the sometimes independent Republicans haven't committed one way or the other whether they would vote to confirm her, but you know, she's still the nominee, and let's talk about her views on birth control. She's written on her website what she says are declining fertility rates. These symptoms and diseases are simply the way the cells express that their needs are not being met, and she talks about fertility statistics, representing that the cells of our body can't cope with our modern environment. She's basically saying, at the cellular level, our bodies are messed up, and that's why there's an infertility problem. But she also seems to not favor modern fertility treatments like in vitro fertilization, and instead, wants people to, you know, treat their cells better. You've done some reporting on Means. Can you enlighten us about this sort of pseudo science that she's promoting as it relates to birth control and fertility?

Sarah J.: Yeah, she's a fascinating case, and I don't mean that in a good way. So it's pseudoscientific. And with a lot of pseudoscience historically, there is kind of the spirituality underneath it, and it is a very reactionary spirituality. And to sort of illustrate this, I could, if you can handle it, read a very brief couple lines from a poem she wrote and published on her website. She's writing about the pill, and so she writes, I'd break your trust in ancient ways and mock the moon and cycles face. I'd push the pill and dull women's flame to womanhood forgot its name. Obviously, a lot to consider there. It's very much tied into the rest of her rhetoric, which she talks about the divine feminine. She talks about sacred fertility, but she's not talking about it in the way that someone at the Heritage Foundation is talking about it. To be clear, it's like this very legibly New Age perspective on women's roles and women's fertility. And as I've written about in the past, for New York, there is a very popular, thriving sort of strain of New Age ideology that talks about the sacred feminine in what's ultimately a very reactionary sort of way. And I see her as being influenced strongly by that. And I do think she speaks for a faction within Maha and you can see pretty easily where that would overlap with, say, the Heritage Foundation. And it's this talk of, for example, restorative reproductive care, which is pseudoscientific. This is not evidence based reproductive medicine, and they use that. They hold that up as an alternative to IVF, for example.

Sarah P.: Right, and also an alternative to birth control.

Sarah J.: To birth control. Natural family planning. Project 2025 promoted they call it modern fertility awareness based methods, which Project 2025 claimed that these methods are unsurpassed in terms of family planning.

Sarah P.: Yes, and that is just simply not true. I mean, a 32 second Google search will bring up plenty of research and evidence that this isn't true. And I'm talking about the Heritage Foundation, but I've seen this reprinted basically verbatim at places like the Free Press, which does not hold itself out as a religious outlet, of course. So it is gaining traction, and with all things, it's sort of hard to tell how much traction it's actually getting. And it also doesn't eliminate the sort of divisions that you're talking about between this more New Age Casey Means sort of approach to this issue, and where the Christian right is coming from. So she has gotten some heat from people like Erick Erickson. Let's take a listen to Erick Erickson, and then we can talk about it.

So Erick Erickson is a pretty influential figure on the Christian right. In 2016 he was sort of anti Trump, and he's, you know, occasionally kind of anti Trump, but he doesn't like the Democrats. So it's not like he's gonna really cede any ground there. But the day after the day of these confirmation hearings for Means, he was pretty mad. And part of the reason he was pretty mad is she's anti vax. But he also says some other things. Let's take a listen.

Erick Erickson [Clip]: So don't take the vaccine modern science created, take hallucinogenics and talk to the demons. That's the advice of the woman Donald Trump has nominated for Surgeon General of the United States. And for every last one of you out there who is concerned with the state of the country who considers yourself a person of faith, if you are not outraged that your administration that you support would promote someone who practices the dark arts of witchcraft, which are condemned in the book you call the Bible that you believe is true, you should look yourself in the mirror and ask, what the hell happened to yourself that you're not outraged by this? Oh, because the other side is a problem. So we're going to support the people who channel the demons on our side. If we got demons in the country, you should be opposed to any side that wants to channel and summon the spirit world. You should be opposed to anyone who thinks you can get magic by walking through the trees or channeling the moonbeams. You cannot be upset with the spiritual and moral direction of the United States of America and support nominating someone who's engaged in witchcraft to be Surgeon General of the United States of America.

Sarah P.: So Erickson is basically saying that he doesn't like Means because she's engaging in witchcraft, and so he's actually criticizing her anti science views, even though maybe he might not be in disagreement with some of her ultimate outcomes. What's he trying to say here?

Sarah J.: You know, I'll start with what's funny to me about that, because she kind of does practice witchcraft, a little bit, if you read her website, especially when we're talking about fertility. I mean, she's talked about, you know, praying to the trees. It's a matter of perspective, but that's not as off base as I think it could be. This specific term that he decided to use is also very interesting. It's very gendered, and I think that has a lot to do with it, that she is a woman who, for very pseudo scientific reasons, has sort of strayed outside her space. So the fact that she's not Christian in the specific way that she needs to be Christian in Erickson's view, and some on the Christian right, I'm sure would agree, then she's suspect, especially because of her gender. And so it's two strikes against her, essentially, in that sense. And so I think that's what's going on there. I've kind of been wondering about the possibility of this divide, not just within Maha but sort of in the Maga coalition writ large, which is very different. They might agree, for example, that marriage to a man and motherhood should be a woman's highest priority, but the esthetics are very different, and the justifications and arguments for and against that are very different. And it does make me wonder if perhaps that is an unstable coalition. For that reason, that is sort of a big question, and pundits have had this debate for a while. Can that coalition survive without Donald Trump as a viable political figure? And I think the answer is sort of a little more complicated. I don't think a Maga coalition can survive without Donald Trump. What I do think could happen is that it'll just sort of mutate into something else. And so I worry, for example, that that coalition may change over time. It may unite around a different figure, but I don't think it's going to become any less radical. I feel like what has been unleashed, you can't reverse that necessarily. You can only control and, from a political sense, defeat it. And I'm not a political strategist, but that is something that I've been thinking about a lot, just the possibility that the right has become so conspiratorial overall, and the GOP with it has become so much more radical and conspiratorial overall. You mentioned this bill in Tennessee about the death penalty for women who get abortions. State legislators have always wilded out, frankly, a little bit. So it's not totally unprecedented, but when you sort of consider it within its context, I don't know if we're going to get this return of a conservative or right wing movement that you can have a conversation with. And I think that the existence of such a movement was always overblown, to be clear. But I do worry that, you know that radicalism, that impulse, that energy, is not going to go away in American politics. And it's a real dilemma.

Sarah P.: One of the things I think about too is that Trump has managed to be the leader of the Republican Party, but also basically the leader of the Christian right. Because I think when you saw the end of the Falwell, Dobson, D. James Kennedy, Pat Robertson era, what had opened up instead, partially because of Trump, sort of creating all of these and enabling all of these influencers, is a much more open field of people who might be called a religious right leader, but there's no longer that handful of religious right leaders that you know are in the reporter's proverbial Rolodex, like maybe you know Richard Land was famously back in the day, right? And so the question is, when Trump is out of power, which he will be eventually by one reason or another, who is that person? It's just an interesting question to me, because I feel like one of the things that he did, that I think is kind of unrecognized or unacknowledged, is that he basically got himself anointed the leader of the Christian right in a way that people like Falwell or Dobson might have been some decades ago.

Sarah J.: The Christian right has always had its little divisions and factional disputes to be clear, but what you're talking about is also real. It has not splintered because it's coalesced around a political figure. But I guess what I would say is this is sort of the natural consequence of becoming the Christian right. Christians have always engaged in politics in the United States, sometimes for progressive reasons, like during the Civil Rights Movement, sometimes not. I'm not even convinced that it's a bad thing for them to do that, necessarily, but the Christian right is by definition, allied with a particular political movement, and now they have sort of become one flesh, to quote my favorite book. And that is, I think, how you ultimately get to someone like Donald Trump. I don't know how you undo that process. I don't know if it's possible. So now you have all these kind of minor figures that represent maybe, are you talking about the more charismatic or Pentecostal members of the Christian right? Are you talking about the Southern Baptist Convention? I think that has happened because they're all sort of subservient now to a single figure, to a single strong man.

Sarah P.: Well, listen, Sarah, thanks so much for joining us today.

Sarah J.: Thank you for having me.

Sarah P.: It's time now for our regular anti doom feature, and I bet you're wondering, how is Sarah going to anti doom us this week with Trump's illegal war in Iran spiraling across the Middle East? I won't try to anti doom you on the war. It's an absolute shit show of hubris, lawlessness, blood lust and zealotry. I'd recommend Episode Two with Julie Ingersoll, in which we discussed Pete Hegseth, God of War, if you want to learn more about what drives the Secretary of Defense. At home, though, in recent weeks, we've seen more evidence of federal judges losing their patience with Trump's out of control Departments of Justice and Homeland Security. They are making more moves to hold government lawyers in contempt, recognizing that these lawyers are no longer entitled to a presumption that they are acting in good faith in their courtrooms. They are issuing ever more scathing opinions condemning the anti constitutional actions of ICE and Customs and Border Protection.

On Tuesday, Judge Gary R. Brown, who was nominated to the bench by President Trump, lacerated the government for its illegal treatment of Hessler Asaf Garcia Lanza, who has lived legally in the United States since he was nine years old, attended college here and now is working as a theatrical lighting designer. Then Judge Brown writes in his opinion, as part of ICE's recent surge in enforcement efforts in violation of constitutional safeguards, statutory guarantees and regulatory restrictions, agents arrested him without a warrant. He was handcuffed, shackled and detained in a facility designed to hold charged and convicted criminals. ICE officers targeted him for arrest simply because he looked like someone else for whom the agents were purportedly searching. Having discovered their mistake when presented with proof that he had legitimate immigration classification and work authorization, ICE agents nevertheless continued to detain him. This, Judge Brown wrote, isn't how things are supposed to work in America. Unquestionably, he continued, the laws of human decency condemn such villainy. While the executive branch retains the right, as it has done, to set policy regarding immigration matters, it is forbidden from trampling our system of laws, a system which has safeguarded this nation for close to 250 years.

This was from a judge that was nominated by President Trump himself. And opinions of other judges across the country back this up. Politico reported this week that in very deep, deep red and very Trumpy West Virginia, four federal judges in multiple rulings have ordered detainees released and threatened to hold government officials in contempt of court for their actions in an immigration crackdown the government dubbed Operation Country Roads. Acknowledging that antiseptic judicial rhetoric cannot do justice to an assault on the constitutional order, US District Judge Joseph Goodwin wrote in a recent opinion that across the interior of the United States, agents of the federal government, masked, anonymous, armed with military weapons, operating from unmarked vehicles, acting without warrants of any kind, are seizing persons for civil immigration violations and imprisoning them without any semblance of due process.

In other cases, judges are showing uncharacteristic anger at government attorneys for violating their orders to release people detained in these raids. These kinds of opinions warning very directly about an armed, authoritarian, lawless government, are important both in the courtroom but also in shaping public opinion. Polls show large majorities of Americans believe the administration must comply with court orders. Judges are now writing opinions clearly intended for public consumption, a sign of the dire stress on our constitutional order and their drive to wake Americans up about it.

Thank you for listening today. Reign of Error is made possible thanks to generous funding from the Henry Luce Foundation, executive produced by Brad Onishi for the Institute for Religion, Media and Civic Engagement and Axis Mundi Media, co-produced by Jer Fitzgerald. I'm the show creator and host. Be sure to subscribe to Reign of Error in your favorite podcast app and like and share it on social media that all really helps spread the word. Join us next week for another episode along with our regular anti doom feature.