The 2025 Iowa legislature marks the first time Republicans have held a supermajority in the House and Senate since 1970. With 67 seats in the House and 34 seats in the Senate, the presence of the Grand Ole Party is strong-standing and grows with each passing year.

And as legislative sessions and conservative dominance unfold, so do the utter hypocrisy of Republicans in the values they say they hold, the platform they run on and their actual policymaking.

The Republican National Committee’s platform highlights individual freedoms in the context of freedom of speech, religion, the right to bear arms, the economy and even outer space. That outer space bit applies to freedom for DOGE head Elon Musk to live out his plans to speed to Mars and let Earth gradually become uninhabitable once and for all. An oligarch billionaire with intentions like that is pretty reminiscent of a supervillain.

The Republican Party campaigns on a platform of constitutional and individual freedoms, yet central to Iowa in the first two months of session, the Senate introduced bills that actively contradict values of freedom.

Specifically, Senate File 138 is a clear violation of the separation of church and state, proposing Bible classes be permitted in public schools as an elective. Under the facade of valuing Freedom of Religion – the liberty to learn and practice theology in public institutions if a student so chooses – lies Republicans’ real interpretation: Freedom of learning about Christianity in public institutions.

The GOP also introduced S.F. 304, a bill that attacks bodily autonomy, requiring teens to have parental consent to get an HPV vaccine (which prevents cancer, by the way). The virus being sexually transmitted highlights the logic of the bill: Teen sex = bad, so cancer = good.

Thus far in the 2025 Iowa legislature, Republicans (who are nationally 94% pro-life) have made impressive moves to prove time and time again they in fact are neither concerned about life, nor the quality of it.

The pro-life party refuses to pass or even hold a subcommittee on paid family leave (S.F. 109), and it refuses to pass a bill that grants adoptive parents the same family leave as biological parents (House File 26). They won’t pass a bill to give tax credits to people who buy firearm safety devices (H.F. 132), won’t pass bills to help with food insecurity and won’t provide school resources for mental health. With a supermajority, Republicans have all the means to pass bills that would protect Iowans.

The influence of conservative policymakers in Iowa is stronger than it’s ever been for the first time in 50 years. At this rate, the quality of public education across the state of Iowa is going downhill fast in more regards than just scarce mental health resources.

President Trump’s Jan. 29, 2025 executive order is an initiative of, “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling.”

Yet, in the same breath — in the same legislative term — Iowa Republicans have introduced S.F. 175, a bill requiring schools to show videos that demonstrate the “humanity of the unborn life,” a medically inaccurate fetal development video that serves as an effort to change the views of kids about abortion and life at conception.

H.F. 269 passed out of committee and is ready for full House debate. It prohibits state universities from teaching critical race theory, social justice, intersectionality, unconscious bias, implicit bias, antiracism, institutional racism, gender-based equity, etc. So much for free speech and intellectual freedom.

It seems as though Republicans have some guilty conscience about the reality of indoctrination and, as a result, are devising the term in inappropriate contexts.

This legislative session, keep your eyes wide open for the contradictory nature of the bills and laws Republican legislators are writing and passing in Iowa. So far, the “pro-life” party known all too well for its cries for small government, constitutional freedom and against indoctrination sure is keen to meddle in what should and should not be taught in schools, what healthcare people can receive, and denying policy that feeds, cares for and protects Iowans. In an adamantly red state and legislative term like Iowa wherein Republicans are dominant in the House and Senate, this is just the beginning of legislation rich with hypocrisy.