Project 2025, the blueprint for so many of the policies and goals of the current Trump administration, is a document of nearly 900 pages. The White House, with its compliant Republican-led Congress, has been plowing its way through the Project 2025 agenda on immigration, border security, the economy, trade, the environment, foreign policy, and defense. But it has not yet fully taken on one of the key goals, “Promoting stable and flourishing married families.” Here’s what we’re in for once they do.
The regressive and the restrictive: Heterosexual marriage and nuclear family supremacy
When Project 2025 declares that it wants to promote married families, it means just one kind of married family: “married mother, father, and their children,” considered to be “the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society (p. 451)”
“LGBTQ+ equity”? They want that repealed. Helping single mothers? No more of that either. Also, nothing that could be construed as a “marriage penalty.”
Single mothers, absent fathers, and their children come in for quite a lot of stereotyping and stigmatizing. The report claims that “Fatherlessness is one of the principal sources of American poverty, crime, mental illness, teen suicide, substance abuse, rejection of the church, and high school dropouts.” I critiqued those claims here. And I shared stories of single mothers and their children who are flourishing, along with relevant research, in Chapter 6 of Single at Heart.
Using tax incentives, educational programs (propaganda), policies, and anything else they can come up with, Project 2025 aims to “strengthen marriage as the norm, restore broken homes, and encourage unmarried couples to commit to marriage.” That’s a map in which all roads lead to marriage. “Broken” homes get put back together with remarriage glue. Unmarried couples don’t stay unmarried. Single people with no children are not mentioned anywhere, but if marriage is to become the norm, it is pretty clear that they, too, are supposed to get married and stay married. And have kids.
The MAGA movement has often been described as promoting white supremacy. Nuclear family supremacy is also part of their brand. And they are not trying to hide it. It is spelled out in the Project 2025 document.
The creepy: Monitoring your sex life
A section on services for children and families includes this assessment of what’s wrong with the current TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) and what CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) should do instead:
“Marriage, healthy family formation, and delaying sex to prevent pregnancy are virtually ignored in terms of priorities, yet these goals can reverse the cycle of poverty in meaningful ways. CMS should require explicit measurement of these goals (p. 476).”
How exactly are they going to measure “delaying sex to prevent pregnancy”? Project 2025 wants that measurement to be a requirement.
The brazenly unethical: Stealing from children to fund propaganda
Project 2025 would like to “allow child welfare funding to be used for marriage and relationship education (p. 480).” They want to take funds that have been allocated “for the purpose of preventing child abuse and neglect” and allow them to be “used for healthy marriage and relationship education.”
Programs purporting to teach people how to have healthy marriages and families, often targeting low-income people, have become increasingly popular. A review of 32 studies of the effectiveness of those programs found no improvement in parenting or in children’s well-being. The organizations and individuals offering these programs do benefit, though – they are getting money that was supposed to be spent on preventing child abuse and neglect.
The disingenuous: Claiming that boyfriends are dangerous but not following that through to its logical conclusion
Project 2025 maintains that “homes with non-related “boyfriends” present are among the most dangerous place for a child to be.” In contrast, they claim that “in the overwhelming number of cases, fathers insulate children from physical and sexual abuse.”
They don’t take this to its logical conclusion. If men are the problem, with boyfriends posing a risk to children and husbands (according to the Project) much less so, then what if we want children to face no threat at all from men in the household? Wouldn’t we want single mothers raising their kids on their own or with other female relatives or friends?
Also, is this the logic: Marry your abusive boyfriend and he will never hurt you or your children ever again?
No matter. Project 2025 wants the Department of Health and Human Services to prioritize married fathers in its messaging and its policies. Because, in one of their typically even-tempered proclamations, “the United States is experiencing a crisis of fatherlessness that is ruining our children’s futures (p. 451).”
The barefoot and pregnant agenda: C’mon women, do you really want to be in the workplace?
According to Project 2025, the Department of Labor “should commit to honest study of the challenges for women in the world of professional work (p. 587).” In the context of the entire document, the implication is clear: A woman’s place is in the home.
But what about single women? If they aren’t supposed to work, then how are they supposed to support themselves? It doesn’t take too much reading between the lines to figure out the answer to that one – they are not supposed to support themselves. They need to find a husband. Then have kids and stay home with them.
[Notes: (1) The opinions expressed here do not represent the official positions of Unmarried Equality. (2) I’ll post all these blog posts at the UE Facebook page; please join our discussions there. (3) Disclosure: Links to books may include affiliate links. (4) Photo by Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa on Unsplash (5) For links to previous columns, click here.]
About Bella DePaulo
