Social and Cultural Issues

Rep. John Joyce is a staunch social conservative, exactly what his constituents demand. He has voted with the Republican conference on essentially every marquee social measure. He doesn’t grandstand or rage-bait on social issues. He rarely speaks publicly on social matters at all. But there’s no question about where he stands.

Joyce is solidly pro-Life and church friendly. Like most of his constituents, he chafes at left-cultural corruption. He’s wisely paid heed to the popular backlash against transgenderism, gender ideology and the distortion of medical practice their rise has facilitated.

The Christian Employers Alliance’s Biblical Business Index gives Joyce an 89.87% lifetime score, ranking him 44th among the 529 members of Congress it rates. In June 2025 he arranged for Pastor Gary Dull of Faith Baptist Church in Altoona to serve as Guest Chaplain and open the House floor in prayer, calling it a chance to showcase “Pennsylvania’s 13th District’s deep connection with God.”

He is a cosponsor of the Life at Conception Act, which defines life as beginning at fertilization, and has publicly backed a constitutional amendment banning abortion. He also opposed the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would have preempted state abortion restrictions nationwide, and backed a 2023 resolution condemning the wave of vandalism and violence against pregnancy resource centers and churches that followed the leaked Dobbs opinion.

Joyce was polite enough to refer to former Pennsylvania Secretary of Health Richard (“Rachel”) Levine as “her” when he excoriated Levine’s conduct during Covid at a House subcommittee hearing in 2023. Joyce called out Levine for shielding “her own family” while forcing COVID-positive patients into other people’s nursing homes, resulting in “thousands of needless deaths.”

But he has not equivocated on transgenderism. Joyce voted for the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, which bars biological males from female school and college athletics (the House Republicans were unanimous, 216-0). He voted for the Protect Children’s Innocence Act, which criminalizes gender-transition medical procedures for minors, and for the Do No Harm in Medicaid Act, which bars federal Medicaid dollars from paying for gender-transition procedures for minors. All three bills passed the House but have not passed the Senate or become law.

Joyce also voted for the Protect Kids Act, which requires parental consent before schools change a minor’s gender markers, pronouns, or preferred name, or grant a student access to sex-based facilities like locker rooms and bathrooms based on gender identity. The bill likewise passed the House and has not become law.

Joyce supported an amendment to the FY2027 defense bill that would have written Trump’s ban on transgender individuals in the military into permanent law. The amendment failed narrowly, 212-217, when four Republicans voted against it. He voted against both House versions of the Equality Act (2019, 2021), a bill that would have added gender identity and sexual orientation to federal civil-rights law.

He also threw his weight against the Respect for Marriage Act, which recognized same-sex marriage under federal law, both on its original 2022 passage and after Senate amendments, and voted against reviving the Equal Rights Amendment that year, which opponents warned would enshrine a constitutional right to abortion.

Joyce backed the Parents Bill of Rights Act — a flagship House GOP response to pandemic-era school closures and curriculum fights — which grants parents the right to inspect local public school curriculum. He also championed a trio of 2023 defense-bill amendments barring the Pentagon from covering abortion-related travel for service members, restricting which flags may fly on military property, and blocking sexually explicit or gender-ideology materials from military-funded schools.

If we had to register any complaint about Joyce and social policy, it concerns AI. PushBack would like to see states retain a clear measure of authority to regulate AI. We think states should also have a right to ban porn and other degenerate varieties of AI, even if they also have the right not to. Alas, Joyce seems unlikely to oblige us. He supports a federal framework for AI regulation, with strict limits on what states can disallow in AI deployment. Still, he wisely carves out some areas for state sovereignty: consumer protection, civil rights, and related issues.

All told, it’s an unimpeachable conservative record.