Former first lady Melania Trump stressed the importance of unifying the nation, telling Fox News Digital that “equality” needs to be the “everyday experience of every American.” 

The former first lady is expected to headline an event at Mar-a-Lago on Saturday, hosted by the Log Cabin Republicans — a pro-LGBT group. The event will focus on the group’s “Road to Victory,” a voter-turnout program planned for gay voters in swing states. 

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“We must unite in our effort to establish a society where equality is the everyday experience of every American,” the former first lady told Fox News Digital. “Individual freedom provides a unifying set of principles, and ultimately establishes our American way.” 

“Together, we must nourish and safeguard the seeds of liberty,” she continued. “Because, when successful, America blossoms into a magnificent place where everyone can practice their beliefs, share new ideas, and express individualism — this is when we are our best.” 

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The former first lady is working alongside former Amb. Ric Grenell for the event. Grenell, who served during the Trump administration as the ambassador to Germany and the acting director of national intelligence, was the first openly gay member of the presidential Cabinet in U.S. history. However, Grenell said that “means absolutely nothing in terms of special treatment.” 

“It simply means that the American dream is alive and well — if you work hard and have a little bit of luck and God’s grace, you can do anything you want in America regardless of your skin color, socio-economic situation, or sexual orientation,” Grenell told Fox News Digital. “We want what every American wants, to be treated equally not differently.” 

Grenell told Fox News Digital that the Republican Party has grown “increasingly welcoming of gay conservatives over the last 20 years.” 

“But we made the most progress when Donald Trump and Melania Trump moved into the White House,” Grenell told Fox News Digital. 

Grenell said that, “Gays and lesbians are no longer reflexively leftist.” 

“They realize they have incredible liberties in America and that they are not opposed,” he explained, noting there are more than 80 Log Cabin chapters across the country that have seen an “explosion of membership.”

“The gay left continues to try and convince America’s gays and lesbians that they don’t have personal freedoms — it’s absurd,” Grenell said.

He added, “Gays and lesbians around the world are literally dying to come to America. We live in the greatest country in the world and Log Cabin members are proud to say it.” 

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Grenell told Fox News Digital that the 2024 election is “about the elites in D.C. versus the rest of America.” He told Fox News Digital that the media and Democrats are “shamelessly defining support for trans kids as a litmus test for supporting gay rights, and it infuriates gay conservatives.” 

As for unity, Grenell said it is Democrats and far-left activists who are to blame for separating Americans. 

Former first lady Melania Trump receives the Lincoln Award at the Log Cabin Republicans event at Mar-a-Lago in November 2021.

“Gay, Inc, and the far-Left activists who control Gay, Inc are spending millions of dollars to separate gays in America,” Grenell said. “They tell young people they must step away from the rest of society because they are oppressed in America. They work hard to make gays angry, weird, separated, and fringe. They want separate flags, pronouns, bakeries, and bathrooms. It’s crazy.” 

Grenell said the left “won’t admit that the equality fight is largely over in America but just beginning in the 69 countries around the world that criminalize gays.” 

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“But gay conservatives know this is the greatest country in the world to be who you are — We are welcomed in every community,” he said. “We aren’t oppressed in America.” 

The former first lady told Fox News Digital that the Log Cabin Republicans’ overarching mission is “important” and “rooted in respect.” 

“Based on this central value, people thrive and exist together in a world where all are honored and celebrated,” she said.   

The former first lady was given the Lincoln Award at a Log Cabin event at Mar-a-Lago in 2021. 

Former first lady Melania Trump and former Amb. Ric Grenell at the Log Cabin Republicans event in November 2021.

Meanwhile, Fox News Digital asked the former first lady what her plans would be for a second term in the White House, should her husband, former President Trump, win the 2024 election. 

“The safety and well-being of American families remains my top priority,” she told Fox News Digital. “Our children are our future leaders, tomorrow’s innovators.” 

She told Fox News Digital that it is “essential we provide the highest level of care to our next generation; to insure they not only thrive but reach their full potential.” 

“In turn, our nation will sustain for generations,” she said. 

During her time as first lady, Trump hosted virtual roundtables on foster care as part of her “Be Best” initiative, and focused on strengthening the child welfare system. She worked with members of Congress on legislation that secured funding for grants awarded to youth and young adults currently or formerly in foster care to help pay for college, career school or training. The bill ultimately was signed by then-President Trump in December 2020.

Since leaving the White House, the former first lady has also created special edition Non-Fungible Tokens. A portion of those proceeds went toward her initiative “Fostering the Future” to secure educational opportunities and scholarships for children in the foster care community.

Arizona’s Supreme Court opened a new front in the war on women’s reproductive rights last week when it resurrected an obscure 1864 law that bans abortion in almost all cases. Critics of the ruling say the court has thrown Arizona back into the 19th century.

That isn’t entirely fair to the 19th century.

The irony of last week’s reactionary ruling is that the author of the original law, William T. Howell, was a progressive by the standards of his time. The politics of Arizona’s current justices bear little resemblance to the 19th century antecedent upon whom their ruling relies.

Although many of Howell’s views have aged poorly, he argued against the era’s prevailing patriarchal dogma and in favor of women’s property rights. Even his abortion law was guided by concerns about maternal health, not the right-wing, religious orthodoxy that animates much of the antiabortion movement today.

If 19th century legal precedent is important, so is historical context. As today’s lawyers and politicians battle over the future of abortion rights, they should understand how and why the original Arizona law came to be. The statute emerged from the upheaval of the Civil War and its little-known front in the West.

As a history professor and the author of a book on this subject, I never expected Howell to become a posthumous standard-bearer for the modern American right. If he’s known at all, it’s as an agent of Abraham Lincoln’s campaign to stamp out slavery in the Southwest and secure Union control of the region.

That story began in the spring of 1861, when a band of migrants from neighboring Texas seized power in southern New Mexico. Proclaiming their affinity for the slave-holding South, they broke from the Union and threw their allegiance behind the newly formed Confederacy. They named their new rebel territory “Arizona.”

Several months later, the Confederacy launched its first invasion of the war — into the Southwest. The rebel invaders routed U.S. troops in several battles, secured military control over Arizona and seized Santa Fe, New Mexico’s capital. Then they planned to march on the gold fields of California.

They never made it. In the spring of 1862, Union troops sabotaged the Confederates’ supplies and finally sent them scrambling back to Texas.

Congress then divided the region into a western half (Arizona) and an eastern half (New Mexico), splitting the erstwhile Confederate Arizona Territory. To strengthen the Union’s tenuous hold, Lincoln poured federal troops and agents into the region. One of them was Howell, newly appointed as an associate justice of Arizona’s territorial Supreme Court.

A veteran jurist and former Michigan legislator, Howell got to work on a new code of laws for Arizona. The final document, now known as the Howell Code, ran to nearly 500 pages. One of its primary purposes was to ensure that slavery would never again take root in Arizona.

Buried within it was the now-infamous abortion ban. The provision was no outlier. In fact, it was copied from California’s legal code, one of many such laws passed by states and territories in the 1860s and ’70s.

From the colonial era into the early 19th century, abortions had been commonly administered and rarely criminalized. Benjamin Franklin even included a recipe for an abortifacient in a math textbook, of all places. Abortions before “quickening” — within roughly the first four or five months of pregnancy — were considered “the purview of women” rather than the law, according to the historian Sarah Handley-Cousins. Even the Catholic Church “implicitly accepted” abortions before quickening, the historian Leslie J. Reagan has noted.

The Howell Code, then, marked a departure from a more permissive approach to abortion. Even so, the antiabortion laws of the mid-19th century were generally born of a sincere concern for women’s health that is absent from today’s legislation. Tellingly, Arizona’s original antiabortion clause appeared within a provision on poisoning. The underlying premise was that abortions posed health risks to women, who were seen as victims and not held legally liable for the medical procedures performed on them.

Howell himself had a woman’s health on his mind at the time. Shortly after drafting the code, he rushed back to Michigan to be at the bedside of his ill wife. She survived, and Howell remained in Michigan, never seeing his code put into practice.

The judge had previously defended women’s right to property in their own name rather than subsumed under her husband’s. He also advocated free public schools and opposed capital punishment (though executions were allowed for certain crimes under the Howell Code).

Howell is no progressive poster child by today’s standards. He was in many ways a man of his time. And his code, written hastily in his provisional courtroom — an adobe shack adjoining a horse corral — reflected some of the prevailing prejudices of the early American frontier, imposing numerous restrictions on people who weren’t white.

But Howell is nevertheless an awkward antecedent for today’s antiabortion movement. If Arizona’s 21st century Supreme Court justices wish to exhume an obscure 19th century predecessor from the recesses of history, that’s their prerogative. But they should understand that even he is misaligned with their extreme politics.

Kevin Waite is an associate professor of history at Durham University and the author of “West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire.”

Despite the White House voicing its opposition against Israel striking back at Iran, the Jewish state issued “limited” strikes early Friday.

Fox News Digital has confirmed there have been explosions in Isfahan province where Natanz is located, though it is not clear whether it has been hit.

A well-placed military source has told Fox that the strike was “limited.”

The news came after President Joe Biden warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the U.S. would not take part in a counter-offensive against Iran.

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John Kirby, the White House’s top national security spokesperson, told ABC’s “This Week” program on Sunday, April 14 that the United States will continue to help Israel defend itself, but does not want war with Iran.

Kirby said “our commitment is ironclad” to defending Israel and to “helping Israel defend itself,” after being asked if the U.S. would support retaliation. 

John Kirby, White House national security communications advisor, during a news conference in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Monday, April 15, 2024. (Bonnie Cash/UPI/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Kirby doubled-down on the fact that Biden does not “seek” war with Iran.

“And as the president has said many times, we don’t seek a wider war in the region. We don’t seek a war with Iran. And I think I will leave it at that,” Kirby added.

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“We don’t seek escalated tensions in the region. We don’t seek a wider conflict,” Kirby said.

Pentagon Press Secretary Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder holds a press conference at the Pentagon on October 19, 2023 in Arlington, Virginia. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

Pentagon Press Secretary Major General Pat Ryder echoed Kirby’s sentiments, sharing in a press briefing that the U.S. does “not want to see a wider regional war.”

“As I’ve highlighted, we do not seek escalation in the region, but we will not hesitate to defend Israel and protect our personnel,” he said during the question and answer segment of the briefing.

“Again, we do not want to see a wider regional war,” he added. “We don’t seek conflict with Iran, but we won’t hesitate to take [the] necessary actions to protect our forces.”

Iran’s medium-range ballistic missile called Hayber (Hurremshahr-4) is seen after the launch during the promotional program organized with the participation of high-ranking military officials in Tehran, Iran on May 07, 2023.  (Iranian Defense Ministry/Hanodut/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Reports of Israel’s “limited strike” against Iran came following a retaliatory strike over the weekend. 

Iran attacked Israel over the weekend in retaliation for Israel’s deadly strike on Iran’s consulate in Syria earlier this month that killed a dozen people, including a top general. 

The weekend attack by Iran marked a major escalation of violence. Despite decades of hostilities between the two nations, Iran has never directly attacked Israel, instead relying on proxy forces in Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere. 

Fox News’ Bradford Betz and Jennifer Griffin contributed to this report.