Project 2025's frightening, Handmaid's-Tale vision for American families

This past weekend Ali Velshi took a deep dive into Project 2025’s frightening vision for the future of America’s families. In chapter 14 of the dystopian playbook, which centers on the Department of Health and Human Services, Project 2025 calls for “a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family,” which the playbook defines narrowly as “heterosexual, intact marriage.” It calls on the next conservative president to use all of the powers at his disposal — regulations, executive orders, policies, etc. — to favor just one type of family: “a married mother, father and their children,” which it defines as “the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society.” This would exclude most marriages in the country, including all same-sex marriages and families, single-parent families and the like. As Project 2025 states:Every threat to family stability must be confronted. This resolve should color each of our policies...The Dobbs decision is just the beginning...we must replace “woke” nonsense with a healthy vision...starting with the American family.In other words, Velshi points out that Project 2025 thinks that the federal government should have the right to dictate what your family should look like — extending the arm of government into your home, and into your bedroom, to enforce a Christian-Nationalist worldview. Project 2025 considers this a core function of the federal government. Gilead anyone?Project 2025 lays out several proposals to undermine the rights of families that don’t fit it’s narrow Christian-Nationalist worldview, including using the federal government to:Protect the rights of businesses to discriminate against same-sex couples. Award grants to faith-based groups that refuse to recognize same-sex couples, specifically groups that “affirm that marriage is between not just any two adults, but one man and one unrelated woman.” Protect faith-based grant recipients that “maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family.” Provide economic incentives to “traditional nuclear families,” calling for policymakers to “use government power, including through the tax code, to restore the American family.”Velshi notes that Project 2025 demonizes same-sex marriages, proclaiming (incorrectly) that any marriage other than those led by a heterosexual couple involve “higher levels of instability, financial stress or poverty, or poorer behavioral, psychological or educational outcomes.”There’s more:The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the project says, should “proudly state that men and women are biological realities” and that “married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them.” The department, the plan insists, spends too much time focusing on “‘LGBTQ+ equity,’ subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage. These policies should be repealed and replaced by policies that support the formation of stable, married, nuclear families.”Project 2025 does much more than demonize same-sex marriages and households. Project 2025’s vision for the family is right out of “Leave It to Beaver,” where the mother stays home with the kids and the father goes out to work. From the plan:“Working fathers are essential to the well-being and development of their children, but the United States is experiencing a crisis of fatherlessness that is ruining our children’s futures.”Thus, HHS policies would “prioritize married father engagement” and stress the importance of heterosexual marriage in all of its health, education, and welfare programs, and it would even enable child-abuse prevention funds to be applied to marriage promotion efforts.Project 2025 describes homes without a husband as being “among the most dangerous places for a child to be.” Wow, just wow.Project 2025 calls for implementing its Handmaid’s-Tale vision as soon as Trump takes office. The playbook notes that “conservatives have just two years and one shot to get this right. Time is running short. If we fail, the fight for the very idea of American may be lost.”Velshi brought on guest Melissa Murray from the NYU School of Law, who called Project 2025’s proposals for American families “very Gilead-forward” and “an absolute disaster for American women.”Although many of these proposals violate current laws, Murray notes how Project 2025 calls for circumventing these laws by deploying all government agencies to interpret these laws differently in order to fit their vision of which families should be prioritized for receiving government resources. This would also include using the Department of Justice to prosecute what they see as discrimination against heterosexual marriage. “All of this can be done simply by controlling the executive branch,” Murray notes. “You don’t need Congress. You don’t need the courts. You just need a president with a new attorney general and a Department of Justice that are willing to deploy for this purpose.”This is indeed scary stuff but it is a very real and immediate threat. It’s all there in black and white what another Trump administration would do to destroy most American families. This is part of Trump’s “past” vision that Kamala Harris talks about all the time. Let’s all fight harder than ever to ensure that we don’t go back.I encourage you to watch the full segment from Velshi’s show: YouTube Video