What does the Republican Party Actually Think of Families?
An exploration of the Project 25 Playbook. Part 1 of 2.
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A lot has been written about Project 2025, a 950 page document that describes what a Trump administration would do in the first 180 days should Trump be elected as POTUS.
It’s really important to know what you’re voting for, and unlike Hitler, who made Germans pay for his political manifesto by purchasing Mein Kampf, the Heritage Foundation has made the Project 2025 playbook, “The Conservative Promise” available as a free, downloadable PDF for all of us to read, take notes on, and utilize to inform our voting decisions in November.
Please take time over the next few weeks to read at least the opening chapter. Take note of the names of the folks who wrote these chapters, as well as the hundreds of contributors, and the organizations that pay these people’s bills. Don’t assume that The Institute for Women’s Health, Ethics and Public Policy Center, and Equal Rights Institute are actually interested in pursuing the goals that their organization titles would otherwise suggest.
You’ll find that even though it’s incredibly long, it’s also quite accessible and direct. And it starts with Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation, identifying the four goals of the document, which Heather Cox Richardson summarizes in Monday’s Letters from an American:
“Project 2025 stands on four principles that it says the country must embrace. In their vision, the U.S. must “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children”; “dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people”; “defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats”; and “secure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls ‘the Blessings of Liberty.’”
I’m wary of anyone who says “dismantle”, if that’s defunding the police or draining the swamp, because dismantling something without a plan to address the inherent power vacuum that follows invites anarchy and disorder. I chuckle at the usage of the word “bounty”—we’re not pirates, Kevin. And I get really anxious whenever Republicans talk about freedom, because freedom includes responsibility towards the wellbeing of everyone in our ecosystem, and the Republican Party has routinely shown in the last 50 years that they aren’t interested in that vision.
However, as a family and relationship therapist, I can get on board with the first task: “Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children”. As a family and relationship therapist who studies the impact of Evangelical religions on sexuality and long-term relationships, I’m always interested to unpack what conservative movements mean when they talk about “family values”.
For instance, what would happen if Republicans invested as much time, money, and resources investing in the health of living children as they do unborn fetuses?
What are strategies that they might encourage to ensure that workplaces allow for a work-family balance?
What are settings that Republicans might create to teach people how to communicate, negotiate, and solve problems in ways that best fit the priorities and circumstances of each American family? (Note to the state of Alabama: Eliminating options by shutting down IVF facilities may not be the best way to do that.)
Obviously, I’m not going to read a 950 page document in a couple of weeks. However, I read through as much as I could by searching for the words “family” and “families”, and taking notes.
While the term family is littered throughout the document, I noticed it appearing primarily in four chapters:
The Preface
The Department of Education
The Department of Health and Human Services
The Department of Labor
In the next two Substacks, I want to note three key features from each of these chapters, including specific policy strategies and literary themes that the authors utilize to suggest their underlying values. I’ll tackle the Preface and the Department of Education today, and the DHHS and Department of Labor on Monday.
The Preface
Every story starts by identifying a problem, a conflict. Kevin Roberts defines it this way.
“Today, the American family is in crisis. Forty percent of all children are born to unmarried mothers, including more than 70 percent of black children. There is no government program that can replace the hole in a child’s soul cut out by the absence of a father. 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. So many of the problems government programs are designed to solve—but can’t—are ultimately problems created by the crisis of marriage and the family.”
We’ll come back to the comment about Black families later. But there are some ideas in “The Conservative Promise” that I hope the Democratic National Convention latches onto, and one of them is the struggles that fathers are having, and the impact of fatherlessness on family systems. While Roberts doesn’t cite his sources, a consistent ethical issue throughout this document, I invite you to read Of Boys and Men, The Life of Dad: The Making of the Modern Father, and Parental Mental Health: Factoring in Fathers for more information about how more intentionally rallying around fathers can be a larger societal good.
But a few paragraphs later, the boogeyman that’s consistently named:
“The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term use to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”
A couple of weeks ago, Julia and I were referred to as “online warriors” in an article on Salon. This week, we’re referred to as “woke culture warriors” by the minions of the Heritage Foundation.
It should be noted that I’ve spent a grand total of zero days in boot camp, military training, or anything resembling a war zone.
The alleged harms of sexual orientation, DEI, and gender equality, and the response of repressing information will come up routinely, which leads to the question that Julia and I ask when studying Purity Culture: Why do we keep thinking that depriving people of information leads to healthy family growth and development?
Roberts refers to Dobbs as “the greatest pro-family win”. He says, “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,” right after saying that there’s a lot about family development that the government can’t regulate.
We’re off to a great start, Kevin! <eyeroll emoji.>
The Department of Education
Lindsey Burke, director of the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation and board member of the Educational Freedom Institute, wrote this chapter. She writes:
“Families and students should be free to choose from a diverse set of school options and learning environments that best fit their needs. They should reflect diversity, with room for not only “traditional” liberal-arts colleges and research universities, but also faith-based institutions, career schools, military academies, and lifelong learning programs.”
I grew up in a public school system that had choice of schools, and deeply benefited from it. Currently, the school district has a high school that serves gifted and talented students, one that specializes in artistic students, one that focuses on math, science, and technology, and one that specializes in vocational programming. I appreciated the proposal about funding families directly and allowing contributions to K-12 education savings accounts, although I get nervous whenever Republicans talk about “charitable nonprofits”.
Then shit gets weird.
Burke writes a piece about how we should diversify the information that we gather information about students to include information about family structure. That information should be made available to the public. She doesn’t say exactly what she’s getting at, but one can read between the lines, especially based on information in other chapters, that they’re attempting to gather information about the effectiveness of families with queer/trans/gender diverse parents, favoring married, heterosexual parents in the process. We’ll talk about this in other Substacks, but the division between public and private is quite skewed in Evangelical and other conservative spaces.
She suggests that the organizations that oversee federal funding for lower income school districts should be transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services, “specifically, the Administration for Children and Families”. As a quick note, DHHS oversees child welfare, so the suggestion that DHHS should oversee federal funding for lower income school district seems to imply that the same system that funds your child’s education also has the power to take your children away. Currently, while K-12 teachers and other school employees are often the primary reporters of family violence and neglect, they are also separate enough from departments of children and family to remove conflicts of interest.
And then we get to the main theme of family engagement in the development of a child’s education. Not programs that encourage parents to read to children. Not programs that develop parent-child relationships through arts, tech, and athletics. Not commentary on how educational standards and standardized testing might be creating more stress and less familial engagement from children.
Parental rights. Burke writes:
“The federal government could demand that schools include curriculum or lessons regarding critical race or gender theory in a way that violates parental rights, especially if it requires minors to disclose information about their religious beliefs, or beliefs about race or gender in violation of the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment.”
Which, of course, is much less about the First Amendment and much more about attacking the alleged boogeyman of DEI, critical race theory, and queer folks that are apparently destroying the moral fiber of our country.
At some point, we’ll write something about Parental Bill of Rights, which are currently state policies in places you’d expect (Oklahoma, Florida, Wyoming) and places you wouldn’t expect (Virginia and Georgia, most notably). Burke explains:
“The next Administration should take particular note of how radical gender ideology is having a devastating effect on school-aged children today—especially young girls.”
Or, if we actually wanted to protect girls in school, we can reduce the likelihood of sexual assault both teach comprehensive sex education, which also includes skills around consent, emotional management while discussing differences, curiosity and diversity, contraception options, and collaboration, and design criminal justice processes that better support survivors of sexual abuse.
This chapter speaks nothing about what the function of an education system is, how a family system might collaborate with the education system as opposed to combat them in the name of “individual liberties”, nor educational standards that might drive goals and support systems for teachers and students.
However, I want to close by talking about my favorite part of this chapter. Burke writes about Advanced School Choice Policies:
“The DC Opportunity Scholarship Program provides scholarships to low-income families. This should be expanded to all students, regardless of income/background.”
Just earlier, in the chapter of the Department of Agriculture, Daren Bakst proposed revising the Community Eligibility Provision, which currently offers free lunches to all school districts who apply, to its original intended audience: students in school districts with an average income of at or below 185% of the poverty line. Perhaps universal free lunch is financially wasteful, perhaps it’s not. Bakst didn’t cite sources, so I have no idea if it actually is wasteful. But Burke agreed with Bakst perspective.
Burke’s proposal that the Scholarship Program should be extended to all families in DC seems quite hypocritical.
But remember, the federal government also doubles as the state government for DC. (Taxation without representation). Many of the people who would be working for the Trump Administration would also be, theoretically, living in DC. If this passes, an expansion of the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program means that employees of the Trump Administration would have access to free education, as well as the hefty salaries that the federal government and ensuing conservative thinktanks would provide.
I audibly said the words “Fuck you” when I read through this section, and got some understandably concerned looks from fellow studiers at the Utrecht library.
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As I mentioned earlier, please take some time to read through the preface and the chapter on the Department of Education. And do something to take care of yourself afterwards.
I’m also curious to hear how you and others in your families and communities are talking about the role of family in 2020s America. What are ways that you wish a political party actually advocated for the healthy development of families?
We’ll talk more about this on Monday when we explore the chapters on the DHHS and Department of Labor.
Until then, have a fantastic weekend!
Let’s heal together,
Jeremiah and Julia