For many Americans, the title of “Coach” automatically precedes the name of Tommy Tuberville. After all, he spent 40 years coaching at the collegiate level. For 11 of those years, (1999-2008), Tuberville was head football coach of the Auburn University Tigers in Auburn, Alabama.
But in 2020, Tuberville added a new appellation to his name by winning a United States Senate seat in Alabama. With 60.7% of the votes cast in his favor, the lifelong coach was now a senator.
Predictably, Senator Tuberville approached legislation similar to the way he approached coaching – head-on with no holds barred.
Perhaps some of America’s veteran legislators did not understand Tuberville’s tenacious nature, or maybe some thought he would be a great public relations frontman – a loveable hometown hero to be seen but not heard.
Welcomed warmly
Whether those in the “clown world” (as Tuberville often calls Washington, D.C.) misread the new senator’s playbook or never read it at all, the freshman legislator proverbially hit the Senate floor running.
At first, the welcome mat was rolled out for Tuberville, and he was soon serving on various prestigious legislative committees and subcommittees, including the Senate Committee on Armed Services; the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry; the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs; and the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.
But after the new senator called his first few plays within these committees, the atmosphere on Capitol Hill changed drastically, especially when Tuberville directly confronted liberal abortion policy hidden in plain sight.
This confrontation occurred after Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin responded to the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson with a formal memorandum titled “Ensuring Access to Reproductive Health Care.” According to the Department of Defense (DOD) website, this “access” would include administrative leave and reimbursement of travel pay so that military members (and dependents) assigned to states where abortions were no longer provided could still access those services.
Changing the game plan
Tuberville shared with The Stand that in early 2023, as a member of the Committee on Armed Services, he addressed Austin’s disregard for over three decades of DOD policy that prohibited abortions except in cases of rape, incest, or peril to the mother’s life.
“The Biden administration and the Department of Defense,” said Tuberville, “decided they were going to change [the law] to their liking without going through Congress.”
The Alabama lawmaker responded sharply to those presumptuous attempts to bypass Congress: “Basically, I told them, ‘Listen, the last I looked, we change the laws here. We make the laws. And we don’t need help from the White House. Now, you get an opportunity to veto it or not, but you don’t change the laws.’”
When the DOD implemented its illegal policy in mid-March of 2023, Tuberville refused to acquiesce. Instead, the seasoned coach basically called an audible on America’s military.
“Well, if you do this,” Tuberville told Austin and the DOD, “I’m going to put a hold on all promotions of your admirals and generals, all your flag officers.”
By forcing senators to spend much more time voting for upper-level military promotions singularly versus in groups, Tuberville expected a short-term political firestorm.
But the senator’s shrewd use of the classic Washington standoff quickly gained attention (and scorn) from the liberal media. As Tuberville’s pro-life blockade of large-group military promotions continued, that scorn grew exponentially.
“I got no negotiation from anybody,” remarked Tuberville. “They couldn’t care less. They really don’t care about the military to begin with, but they sure don’t care about life.
“But I come from a pro-life state in Alabama, and I got lots of encouragement from the people of Alabama and from pro-life groups all over the country.”
From hero to zero
Over time, even pro-life legislators abandoned Tuberville in this fight. Reasoning that abortions were not directly funded by Austin’s travel reimbursement policy, several conservative senators threatened joining liberal colleagues to change Senate rules and bypass Tuberville.
On December 5, 2023, after months of standing for life and standing against the DOD’s defiance of abortion laws, executive overreach, and biased media coverage, Tuberville relented to military promotions en masse.
His “progressive” counterparts immediately declared his fight a waste of time. Tuberville responded by highlighting the raised awareness of the military’s illegal use of taxpayer money for abortion aid and highlighting the unrealistic lifestyle of many in Congress.
“A lot of these people up here never had a job before,” Tuberville said. “They’d never been criticized. So criticism didn’t bother me if I knew I was doing the right thing.
“I still believe I was doing the right thing,” he added. “I’d just run out of time and run out of supporters. …We had to give in, unfortunately, but the fight is still on.”
Defending female athletes
The senator’s current fight to do “the right thing” has grown to encompass Title IX and gender issues in sports.
Passage of the 1972 Education Amendments prohibited discrimination of any kind in schools or educational programs receiving federal funding. Among those pivotal civil rights amendments, Title IX afforded girls the same academic and athletic participation rights as boys, including equal equipment, facilities, and coaching.
As a result, women’s sports flourished – until 2023 – when the Department of Education (DOE) proposed drastic changes to Title IX, specifically concerning gender equality.
According to Tuberville, the 116 pages of the DOE’s proposed changes actually facilitate sexual discrimination toward women by allowing men to participate in women’s sports – as women.
“They’re tearing the family down, the nuclear family,” he explained, “and they’re tearing gender down. They don’t want any gender.
“They want everybody to be the same. And we all know that’s not true. You can’t change gender. I mean, you’re either male or you’re female.”
To counterattack this insanity, Tuberville proposed the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act on March 1, 2023, which passed the House (HR 734) but was blocked by the Senate.
Determined to win
Undaunted, on February 1, 2024, he proposed the Protection of Women in Olympic and Amateur Sports Act (S.3729). Tuberville hoped for two groups of staunch supporters – women athletes who have trained a lifetime to compete at the Olympic level and mothers of young girls in amateur sports.
At press time, S.3729 had only been referred to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. But National Review reported that already “the national governing body for amateur/Olympic-style boxing recently codified a rule permitting male participation in the women’s division in its 2024 rulebook.”
Tuberville sees that change as a recipe for disaster, ending with the unnecessary but inevitable injury of female athletes.
Therefore, the fight goes on, and the good senator from Alabama humbly asks readers to pray for the sanctity of life – inside and outside the womb.
“Praying for me is fine,” said Tuberville, “but pray for our young people. The number one commodity in our country is young people. But they are being attacked by social media, the government, and a lot of different things in our country that you and I didn’t have to fight through. So pray for our young people.”
(Digital Editor's Note: This article was published first in the June 2024 print edition of The Stand. Click HERE to get a free six-month subscription.)
