It is no secret that the mainstream media, Hollywood, and the left in Washington think lowly of conservative women. When they aren’t insulting our appearances, hoping for our misfortune, or just out right ignoring our existence, they are prescribing a motive to us. After all, why in the world would any woman want to vote Republican? Often, the answer to these people is that us Republican voting women are voting to appease the men in our lives. Of course, it can’t be our own thoughts and opinions that lead us to our vote. It is instead the thoughts and opinions of our husbands and fathers that drive us to vote the way we do. In fact, even Taylor Swift said as much in her new Netflix documentary, Miss Americana. Swift said that the first female Senator from Tennessee, Republican Marsha Blackburn only won by, “being a female applying to the kind of female males want us to be in a horrendous 1950s world.”

Cue the laughter of conservative women everywhere. 

Anyone who thinks that conservative women only vote and think the way we do because we want to appease men has clearly never met a conservative woman before. It is laughable to imagine that Senator Marsha Blackburn faced the horrible rhetoric mainstream media painted her with during her election just to make her husband happy. It is impossible to think that Dana Loesch faced the angry CNN audience that wished her death just to appease a man in her life. Yet, this is what so many celebrities and media personnel would want you to think. 

The values of limited government, free speech, the Second Amendment, individual responsibility don’t favor any gender. They favor all of us living in this country. That is what conservative women are voting for.

We aren’t voting in support of the Second Amendment to please our hunter boyfriends or fathers, we are voting for it in support of our own empowerment to protect ourselves.

No, we aren’t voting for pro-life candidates because that’s what our husbands told us to do. We are voting for them because each one of us personally decided that a child’s life is more important than the inconvenience people think they bring to their lives. 

I want lower taxes because I work hard for my money, and I deserve to be able to keep it and spend it on whatever I want.

I want to support free speech because I want to be able to share my opinions loudly and proudly on a college campus without fear of censorship.

Yes, I want to cut down on business regulations because if I decide to one day start my own business I don’t want big government to get in my way.

The last thing I am thinking about when I support these policies and values is my boyfriend or father. Despite what the left may think, I am in fact voting with a woman’s self-interests in mind, my own interests. 

Conservative women deserve better than to be thrown to the backrooms of history and politics, brushed off as women dutifully voting at the polls for no other reason than the wants of their husbands or fathers. Like every woman in this country, we are individuals full of different facets and ideas. None of us are perfectly alike even in our own party. Ann Coulter is nothing like Allie Stuckey who is nothing like Candace Owens who is nothing like Meghan McCain. We won’t even vote on the basis of appeasing each other let alone to appease some vague idea of what men may want. 

It is easy for the left to brush off the percentage of women that support Republican senators or the President as “brainwashed” “people pleasers” who weren’t voting in their own interests. It means that they don’t have to look at women as individual voters and instead can continue to view us as a monolith that they can pander to with ease to get votes. Unfortunately for them so many elections within the past couple of years have proven them wrong. Conservative women voted for Ted Cruz, Marsha Blackburn, Martha McSally, Ron DeSantis, President Trump, and many others like them. People’s dismissal of us and the motives they assume we have ,have never and should ever stop us from voting the way we want. 

The only person whose opinions, values, and passions I am voting with in mind on Election Day is my own. That is what conservative women have always done and will continue to do no matter what the left may think of us. 

Stormi R
CABINET