Thoughts for the Day, March 18, 2026: Dedicated to the strong women in my life. Recognize the SAVE Act for what it is. It is not about solving voter fraud. It is about voter suppression.

Women

I have been blessed to be surrounded by strong women. In my immediate family it was my mother Maggie, my sister Nancy, my daughter Katy, and the strongest of all, Leah. During my career, I worked with many women who were smarter and better leaders than me. On the many boards I served, it was the same situation.

I dedicate following to Leah, my daughter Katy, my sister Nancy and to all the women who have had a tremendous influence on my life, many of whom are subscribers to this blog. The article was written by Mary Geddry who is becoming one of my favorite bloggers. I have edited the article because of length.

This essay is about what Project 2025 wants women to give up. It wants a country where abortion is harder to access, contraception is easier to restrict, the language of “gender equality,” “reproductive health,” and “reproductive rights” is stripped from federal policy…

It is a fight over whether women will be allowed to remain fully autonomous adults or pushed back toward a social order in which our safety, dignity, and survival are meant to depend more heavily on husbands, fathers, churches, employers, and the state. That is why I am writing this. Because the attack on women’s independence is not only cruel, it is historical vandalism. It asks us to forget what women have done with freedom, and to accept a future built on making us smaller.

…once you strip away the polished language about family, morality, and social order, the basic complaint underneath this worldview(Project 2025) is not hard to hear. Women are too independent. Women have too many choices. Women can leave, delay, refuse, invent, achieve, organize, earn, and live in ways that do not place men at the center of every calculation. Project 2025 says families “comprised of a married mother, father, and their children” are the foundation of a “well-ordered nation and healthy society,” and condemns what it calls “subsidizing single-motherhood,” and proposes replacing those policies with ones that support “stable, married, nuclear families.” Elsewhere, the Project 2025 text calls for deleting terms such as “gender equality,” “abortion,” “reproductive health,” and “reproductive rights” from federal rules and programs, and it pushes defining sex under Title IX as biological sex recognized at birth. This is not a blueprint for making women freer. It is a blueprint for making women smaller.

….Don’t you remember what women have already done in this country when given room to breathe?

Don’t you remember Rosie the Riveter, not as a piece of nostalgia on a tote bag, but as a stand-in for millions of women who entered wartime industry when history demanded it? …At Richmond’s Kaiser shipyards and elsewhere, women welded, riveted, assembled, and kept the machinery of war moving. America did not lose World War II because women entered the workforce. America depended on them…. but a woman in a modern engineering program is where some men suddenly discover their concerns about social stability.

Don’t you remember the women of NASA and NACA, the mathematicians, engineers, programmers, and team leads whose work powered American flight and the space race? NASA itself now honors the women who served as computers, mathematicians, and engineers from the 1930s through the 1970s, including Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson. Their calculations, leadership, and technical work were not ornamental. They were foundational. These women were doing some of the most intellectually demanding work in the country…

And yes, let’s be even more specific. Don’t you remember Margaret Hamilton? She led the Software Engineering Division at MIT’s Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed the onboard flight software for Apollo. NASA credits her as a key contributor to the software effort behind the lunar missions… So when Scott Yenor says, “Every effort must be made not to recruit women into engineering, but rather to recruit and demand more of men who become engineers. Ditto for med school, and the law, and every trade,”

… If your social philosophy collapses at the sight of a woman engineer, the delicate thing in the room is not womanhood.

And while we are on the subject of women in science, don’t you remember Pearl Kendrick and Grace Eldering? In the 1930s, working in the Michigan Department of Health laboratory in Grand Rapids, they began the research that led to an effective pertussis vaccine. Their work moved from painstaking local public-health research into mass production and widespread vaccination, helping sharply reduce disease and death. These were not women making themselves useful in some decorative, auxiliary sense. These were women helping save children’s lives.

A movement that wants women less educated, less independent, and less present in serious work is not defending civilization. It is spitting in the face of the women who helped keep children alive in it.

That is why I find the rhetoric of this movement so offensive. It is not only misogynistic. It is embarrassingly ungrateful. It asks women to forget our own inheritance and then asks the rest of the country to call that forgetfulness virtue. It asks us to believe that women’s freedom is somehow in tension with the national good, when the historical record keeps showing the opposite.

When women have access to education, to work, to research, to technical training, to law, to medicine, to engineering, and to political life, society does not become weaker. Society becomes more capable, we solve more problems, we build more things, we save more lives, and we widen the circle of who gets to count as fully human.

Which is exactly why men like Scott Yenor sound the way they do. Yenor, who now serves as a director at the Heritage Foundation has described independent women as “medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome.” Those are not slips, those are beliefs. They reveal, with unusual honesty, that what agitates this worldview is not female weakness, it is female capability. Weak men do not fear women because women are “useless,” they fear women because they know perfectly well what women can do when we are not trapped.

And that is where the Project 2025 agenda around fertility becomes impossible to ignore. A woman who can control whether and when she becomes pregnant has more leverage over the shape of her life. She has more room to study, more room to earn, more room to leave, more room to refuse humiliation, more room to decide that she would rather build a life on her own terms than accept dependence dressed up as protection. That is why contraception matters, why abortion access matters, why support for single mothers matters, and why childcare matters. These are not side issues orbiting some larger debate about culture, they are the architecture of female freedom.

Project 2025’s hostility to reproductive autonomy and its preference for a social order organized around married male provision are not separate matters, they are part of the same design.

And I want to say this as plainly as I can. Women do not deserve independence because men have graciously decided to permit it. Women deserve independence because we have shown.. what we do with it. We build ships, we write code, and we run calculations. We organize labor, create vaccines, we hold families together, and we fight for the vote.

There is a peculiar smallness to a worldview that sees a free woman and immediately begins thinking about how to reduce her options... It cannot imagine women as fully human citizens, so it keeps reaching for older scripts in which a woman becomes respectable only by orbiting a husband, a father, a church, or a boss….

What infuriates me most is that women are expected to accept this with gratitude,... We are supposed to overlook the fact that the same movement that romanticizes motherhood is often hostile to the concrete things that make women safer and freer within motherhood, including reproductive choice, economic independence, and support for women raising children without a husband…. It is a backlash against women having enough power to say no.

But I do not want to answer it only with disgust. I want to answer it with memory and with love. Love for the women who came before us and did extraordinary things in a world that offered them less. Love for the women who refused to stay small….

So yes, let’s say it clearly. Any man who thinks estrogen is evidence of inferiority is not revealing women’s weakness, he is revealing his own. He is telling you that female freedom makes him feel threatened….That is not strength, it is panic in a necktie.

And that is why I refuse the whole Project 2025. I refuse the lie that women are more dignified when we are less free, that dependence is safety, and that family values require female submission. I refuse the lie that women’s independence is some elite modern indulgence rather than a proven public good. History remembers better than that, Rosie remembers. Margaret Hamilton, Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Pearl Kendrick and Grace Eldering all remember. The country we have is, in part, the country women built when we were allowed to work, think, invent, and act like full human beings.

. Call your representatives and pressure your senators…. Teach your sons that women are not here to be ruled, and teach your daughters that freedom is theirs to keep.

See my Video of the Day for Aretha’s take on this.

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Democracy is not measured by how hard it is to vote. It is measured by how many U.S. citizens are able to do so.

Question of the Day: The question is not whether we should have secure elections—we must. The question is whether we are willing to solve real problems with real solutions, or whether we will allow the perception of a problem to justify barriers that weaken participation?

In recent weeks, the proposed Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act has been framed as a necessary step to protect the integrity of American elections. Its central claim is straightforward: prevent non-citizens from voting and eliminate voter fraud. On the surface, that sounds reasonable. But when we step back and examine the data, a different picture emerges—one that raises a more important question: Are we solving a real problem, or creating a new one?

Let’s begin with the facts. Voter fraud in the United States is exceedingly rare. Organizations committed to identifying fraud, such as the Heritage Foundation, have documented that only 1,620 people have been convicted of voter fraud since 1982 across billions of ballots cast. That translates into a statistical rounding error—far less than one hundredth of one percent.

Equally important, the specific concern driving the SAVE Act—non-citizen voting—is already addressed under current law. It is illegal for non-citizens to vote in federal elections, and doing so carries serious penalties, including fines, imprisonment, and potential deportation. There is no credible evidence that non-citizen voting occurs at any scale that could influence election outcomes.

So, if the problem is negligible, why the urgency?

The answer lies not in election integrity, but in election access.

The SAVE Act requires documentary proof of citizenship—such as a passport or birth certificate—when registering to vote. While that may sound like a simple safeguard, the practical implications are significant. Millions of Americans do not have easy access to these documents. Older citizens, rural residents, lower-income individuals, and even married women whose legal names differ from their birth certificates could face new barriers to registration.

In effect, the burden shifts from the state proving ineligibility to the citizen proving eligibility—with documentation that is not universally available or easy to obtain.

We have seen versions of this dynamic before. Throughout American history, voting restrictions have often been justified in the name of “integrity” while disproportionately affecting participation. Poll taxes, literacy tests, and other barriers were once defended as necessary safeguards. Over time, we recognized them for what they were: obstacles to voting.

Election security is important. Confidence in our electoral system depends on both integrity and access. But those two goals must be balanced with evidence, not fear. They must be balanced with practical reality. When policy is driven by rare or hypothetical risks, it can produce real consequences.

The United States has built a voting system that, while imperfect, is fundamentally secure. The greater risk to that system today is not widespread fraud—it is declining trust and reduced participation. Measures that make it harder for eligible citizens to vote undermine the very democracy they claim to protect.

If we are serious about strengthening our elections, we should focus on improving access, modernizing registration systems, and ensuring that every eligible American can vote easily and confidently. Safeguarding democracy means protecting both the ballot and the voter.

Democracy is not measured by how hard it is to vote. It is measured by how many U.S. citizens are able to do so.

I authored the above with assistance from CHAT GPT

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Quote of the Day: That is not strength, it is panic in a necktie. Mary Geddry from the above article on Women

Orchid of the Day: Mary Geddry, for knocking it out of the park today.

Onion of the Day: The Republicans who are trying to sell the Save Act as election security, when it is election suppression.

Question of the Day: The question is not whether we should have secure elections—we must. The question is whether we are willing to solve real problems with real solutions, or whether we will allow the perception of a problem to justify barriers that weaken participation?

Lyrics of the Day: Right now, freedom (freedom)
Oh-oh, freedom (freedom)
Give me some freedom
Oh, freedom! Oh-oh, right now
Hey! Think about it
You! Think about it

There ain’t nothin’ you could ask
I could answer you with “I won’t” (I won’t)
But I was gonna change, but I’m not
If you keep doin’ things I don’t (don’t)

Lyrics of the Day for March 13, 2026. Brother Love Traveling Salvation Show by Neal Diamond

Video of the Day: The Blues Brothers | Aretha Franklin Sings “Think” in 4K HDR - YouTube

I write reflective, opinionated essays on leadership, politics, sports, and life—grounded in experience rather than ideology. If this perspective resonates with you, you can subscribe here for free.