Progressive Pride flag. (Image by Bigstock, from Washington Blade)
Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s ultra-conservative blueprint for the next Republican president, envisions an Ozzie and Harriet-style society in which children are raised by married heterosexual parents, unburdened by the prospect of same-sex neighbors or drag queen story hours at the local library.
The cornerstone of Project 2025’s “Conservative promise” is to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.”
“…the next President has a moral responsibility to lead the nation in restoring a culture of life in America again,” to reverse the current administration’s “focus on ‘LGBTQ+ equity,’ subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage,” and replace with policies “encouraging marriage, work, motherhood, fatherhood, and nuclear families.”
Not all families are created equal under Project 2025, which suggests economic incentives for traditional heterosexual couples. “It’s time for policymakers to elevate family authority, formation, and cohesion as their top priority and even use government power, including through the tax code, to restore the American family.”
The doctrine, by redirecting federal funding to support the “biblically based” definition of a family, undermines families of same-sex couples. “Families comprised (sic) of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society,” it says.
The passage echoes Republican vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance, who brought the Project 2025 perspective into focus in a 2021 Fox News interview, in which he identified Vice President and likely Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris as one of the “childless cat ladies” who is “miserable” with her life. “The entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children” who don’t have a “direct stake” in America, Vance said.
In 2022, Vance doubled down and suggested leaving an unhappy marriage, even a violent one, is bad for children.
The federal Office on Women’s health says children who witness or experience domestic violence “are at serious risk for long-term physical and mental health problems” and those who witness violence between parents may be at greater risk of being violent in their own relationships.
Alternatives to abortion, “especially adoption, should receive federal and state support,” says Project 2025. Adoptions are already subsidized for a number of children via state and federal sources, however, only a fraction (about 25%) of available children are adopted each year, according to state data.
Project 2025 contends the existing law threatens “faith-based adoption agencies” with lawsuits for discriminating against prospective parents. It seeks legislation to “maximize options” for children by ensuring agencies can’t be “subjected to discrimination for providing adoption and foster care services based on their beliefs about marriage.” It seeks to repeal an Obama administration rule prohibiting providers from discriminating against those who want to adopt.
While the reality is that more than 23 million children (one in three) in America live in a single-parent home, Project 2025 emphasizes an existential need for two heterosexual parents.
“The world has never seen a thriving, healthy, free, and prosperous society where most children grow up without their married parents,” the manifesto reads. “If current trends continue, we are heading toward social implosion.”
The societal threat, according to Project 2025, is “the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children,” addressed in the playbook with a call to outlaw pornography, the playbook’s catch-all code word for the existence of LGBTQ+ individuals.
“Pornography should be outlawed,” Project 2025 declares, without describing the punishment awaiting offenders. The Heritage Foundation did not respond to an inquiry. “The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”
Rockathena Brittain, a transgender woman who unsuccessfully challenged Nevada Congresswoman Susie Lee in the Democratic primary election, says equating pornography with gender diversity is a threat to the LGBTQ+ community.
“Any LGBTQIA+ expression – our existence – is to be legally categorized and charged as pornography,” Brittain says of Project 2025’s objectives. “They want to remove any anti-discrimination protections that are afforded to the LGBTQIA+ community in terms of employment, housing, lending, and all other aspects of public life.”
Nevadans of all ages, she says, enjoy protections such as the ability to receive gender-affirming care or change their names or gender marker on a driver’s license or birth certificate.
“You can basically do everything you need, but LGBTQ+ organizations here are really complacent,” she says, adding people frequently discount the likelihood of Project 2025’s policies taking root. “It just sounds too hyperbolic and extreme, but that’s the attitude that got us to Roe v Wade being overturned when it could have been codified by the Democrats a long time ago.”
Nevada State Sen. Dallas Harris, a Democrat who is seeking re-election, says any federal regulations or legislation tying Medicaid or Medicare funds to a prohibition on gender- affirming services would be challenged.
“I’m not doing a constitutional analysis here but there are definitely ways to tie federal dollars to actions that the federal government wants to see, both good and bad,” says Harris, an attorney.
Dozens of providers and facilities throughout the state that receive federal funding and provide gender-affirming care to youth and other services to adults could be affected, should Project 2025’s provisions become policy.
“Basically, it would gut programs at The Center,” says Dr. Jerry Cade, medical director of the Gay and Lesbian Center of Las Vegas. “Our money comes for things like gender-affirming care and DEI initiatives.”
Cade adds that HIV testing “is not specifically LGBTQ, but a lot is, and so I don’t know what Project 2025 would do to that.”
“The bottom line is if those policies were implemented, much of our funding would be cut,” Cade says. “That does not mean that we would close. We will fight like hell to do whatever we can to take care of our patients. Project 2025 would hurt us, but not defeat us.”
Nnedi Stephens, who ran the successful 2022 campaign to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment in Nevada, says they are aware of people who doubt the provisions of Project 2025 could come to pass.
“It takes a lot of privilege to believe that,” Stephens said during an interview. “Would [former Pres. Donald] Trump really get all of the things on the wish list? Any of the items on the wish list would have a deleterious, dangerous, harmful, potentially fatal impact on the lives of everyday LGBTQ+ people and children.”
Brittain points to a number of states that have passed or are considering anti-gay legislation.
“In Florida, it’s criminal if you try to change your driver’s license gender marker. Montana does not allow you to do it. South Carolina just passed a ban on gender-affirming care for minors. They haven’t outlawed being gay or being trans yet in those states, but they’re on their way.”
Brittain notes an appellate court recently upheld a Tennessee law that bans minors from drag shows. “All you have to do is look at how many laws against us there are now that are entirely consistent with Project 2025.”
In Florida, the DeSantis administration has issued a policy blocking transgender people from changing their drivers’ licenses to reflect the gender with which they identify. Legislation to enact the policy into law, and to require insurers that cover gender reassignment treatments to also offer detransitioning coverage, passed the Florida House this year but died in committee in the Senate.
‘One man and one unrelated woman’
While at least one effort to abolish same-sex marriage already exists, the manifesto doesn’t overtly seek to end it. Instead, it eliminates protections for LGBTQ+ individuals by erasing inclusive language from federal regulations, and favors heterosexual families by granting government funding to organizations and agencies “who affirm that marriage is between not just any two adults, but one man and one unrelated woman.”
Project 2025 asserts Democratic administrations “have nearly erased what females are and what femininity is through ‘gender’ policies and practices” and suggests “refocusing Gender Equality on Women, Children, and Families.”
Project 2025 seeks to do away with the executive office’s Gender Policy Council, which “was established by President Biden to advance gender equity and equality in both domestic and foreign policy development and implementation,” according to the White House, and claims that doing so would “eliminate central promotion of abortion; comprehensive sexuality education; and the new woke gender ideology, which has as a principal tenet ‘gender affirming care’ and ‘sex-change’ surgeries on minors.”
Vance introduced a bill last year that would criminalize gender-affirming care for minors.
Half of the states already have bans on access to gender affirming care for young people.
Vance opposes including a third gender option on passports. “There are only two genders — passports issued by the United States government should recognize that simple fact,” he wrote on his website.
Project 2025 asserts the National Institutes of Health has long “been at the forefront in pushing junk gender science. The next HHS secretary should immediately put an end to the department’s foray into woke transgender activism.”
Project 2025 also seeks to amend Title IX, the law that protects people from sex-based discrimination in education and school activities, to define “sex” as “only biological sex recognized at birth.”
Trump’s forgotten agenda?
Trump has attempted to distance himself from Project 2025. But his own Agenda 47, which his campaign touts as “the only official comprehensive and detailed look at what President Trump will do if he returns to the White House,” lays out policies that mirror those in Project 2025.
Agenda 47 proposes:
-an end to gender affirming care for minors. It instructs federal agencies to end programs that promote the concept of gender transition at all ages, and threatens to pull federal funding, as well as Medicaid and Medicare eligibility, from providers and hospitals that fail to comply;
-creating pathways to sue practitioners who perform gender-related procedures for minors;
-directing the Department of Justice to investigate pharmaceutical companies and hospitals to determine if they “deliberately covered up horrific long-term side-effects of ‘sex transitions’ to get rich at the expense of vulnerable patients”;
-passing legislation establishing that male and female are the only genders recognized by the U.S. and are assigned at birth.
Critics suggest Project 2025’s policies are also in lock step with Russia’s 2013 anti-gay laws, entitled ‘For the Purpose of Protecting Children from Information Advocating a Denial of Traditional Family Values’.
Last year, Russia’s highest court ruled that LGBTQ+ activists can be imprisoned for displaying their support for the cause.
Brittain notes that state legislatures across America entertained more than 500 anti-trans bills in 2023, with more than 80 becoming law. Utah recently passed an anti-trans bathroom measure.
DEI backlash
Project 2025 seeks to impose its values globally via a reboot of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which is primarily responsible for administering civilian foreign aid and development assistance. The manifesto says DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) directives are ubiquitous in federal policy, including in the U.S. Agency for International Development.
“The Biden Administration has deformed the agency by treating it as a global platform to pursue overseas a divisive political and cultural agenda that promotes abortion, climate extremism, gender radicalism, and interventions against perceived systematic racism,” Project 2025 says.
“This pursuit of ideological purity threatens merit-based professional advancement for staff who do not overtly conform, hyperpoliticizes (sic) what should be a nonpartisan federal workplace environment, creates an institutionalized cadre of progressive political commissars, corrupts the award process, and discourages potential contractors and grantees that disagree with this radical agenda…”
The irony of Project 2025 touting a “nonpartisan federal workplace” is not lost on Stephens, who says the doctrine is a wake-up call for some.
“But for people who are directly impacted by having identities that are marginalized, these are a lot of the same issues of discrimination, of hatred, of systemic oppression, that we find on a day-to-day basis,” says Stephens. “This isn’t new. There might be new packaging, but the hatred has always been there and that it’s important for all of us to come together to fight back.”
“People in my community do not fully realize what’s going to happen to them yet under Project 2025. Kevin Roberts, the director of Project 2025, said on TV they aren’t releasing all of their plans yet,” says Brittain, adding she’s frustrated the manifesto hasn’t received more attention until recently.
Roberts did not respond to requests for comment by press time.
“It’s about time we start believing Donald Trump when he says something,” says Harris. “I often hear this idea of, ‘Oh, well, he doesn’t really mean it,’ or ‘he’s just talking,’ and then time and time again he follows through. I’m not going to make that mistake of underestimating the level of cruelty, frankly, that we might see out of another Trump administration. Believe what he says. They’ve got it written down.”
This story is one in an occasional series on Project 2025 and its potential impact on Nevadans. See an earlier story on the plan’s nuclear waste and weapons testing policy here, and a story on Project 2025’s organized labor policies here. The story first appeared in the Nevada Current, with the Phoenix a member of the nonprofit States Newsroom network. Michael Moline contributed in Tallahassee.
This story is courtesy of Florida Phoenix.
Florida Phoenix is a nonprofit news site, free of advertising and free to readers, covering state government and politics with a staff of five journalists located at the Florida Press Center in downtown Tallahassee. Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
