Whoever ends up President of the United States come November, there will surely be shifts in political policy. New laws will be enacted while others will be completely dismantled, and this will affect what Americans can and can't do in their private lives, regardless of who wins. There's just no denying the very different but very impactful agendas advanced by both sides of the US political coin. Admittedly, one side has a much clearer agenda than the other, the one outlined in the now infamous document dubbed Project 2025, a blueprint for the policies of a second Trump term.
What is Project 2025?
As stated on the title page of Project 2025, the 920-page “Mandate for Leadership,” was created by the conservative think-tank the Heritage Foundation, as a “Presidential Transition Project" rooted in far-right Christian ideology. The Heritage Foundation is an American conservative group, based in the US capital, founded in 1973 but rising to prominence during the 1980s and President Ronald Reagan’s reign.
The sprawling dossier is composed of separate chapters addressing each major executive branch agency or office, written by a supposed "expert" in these areas. How learned these people are and how factual their rhetoric might be, is left open for debate, as is whether these "experts" are just conservative thinkers angling for government appointments in a Trump White House.
While a deeper dive would require more space than allotted here (and more patience than any sane reader could ever manage), Project 2025's proposed restrictions on pornography, LGBTQIA2S+ rights, reproductive rights, and the personal lives and lifestyle freedoms of American that has us (and other sane members of society) ducking for cover!
A total ban on pornography
Far-right Christian-fueled political groups, aided and abetted by other right-leaning religious organizations, have been attempting to ban pornography for decades. And even though this white noise (white in more ways than one) has been heard in American politics for years, according to the Project’s page five:
“Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women.”
Furthermore, the project states:
“Pornography should be outlawed. 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.”
There doesn’t seem to be any wiggle room here; porn producers go straight to jail, don't pass Go, do not collect $200, no get out of jail free card.
The eradication of LGBTQIA2S+ rights
As stated clearly in the emotive first sentence of Project 2025’s mandate above, the authors of Project 2025 see the demon of porn and some sort of "transgender ideology" (whatever this means) are inextricably linked to the “sexualization of children.” And nothing gets a crowd more incensed than if they believe their children are in danger!
There is no doubt, as The Advocate warns, that Project 2025 has LGBTQIA2S+ people “directly in its crosshairs.”
In the document, Roger Severino, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, states that policies advancing "LGBTQ+ equity," as well as programs subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage, "should be repealed and replaced by policies that support the formation of stable, married, nuclear families.”
Painting with the broadest of strokes (and a paintbrush decidedly free from any rainbow colors), Severino and his brethren seemingly want to remove protections and benefits for any unions and intimate relationships that don’t fall into the “nuclear family” definition.
And apparently, they have no idea of what is happening in the lives of people and families not living a hetero normative life. Spoiler alert: they're just fine and their existence isn't hurting anyone. In spite of that, Project 2025 still strongly recommends repealing legislation that allows trans folks to serve in the military and banning any kind of gender-affirming care nationwide.
The plan also calls for the withdrawal of the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program, which will gut treatment for people living with HIV and AIDS, a condition that still disproportionately impacts queer folks.
Project 2025 makes it very clear that the government envisioned within absolutely will not support all American citizens.
Repealing marriage equality nationwide
Under a point of the Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education (HMRE) Program, it is clearly stated that Project 2025 sets out to:
“Protect faith-based grant recipients from religious liberty violations and maintain a biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family.”
Furthermore “Social science reports that assess the objective outcomes for children raised in homes aside from a heterosexual, intact marriage are clear: All other family forms involve higher levels of instability (the average length of same-sex marriages is half that of heterosexual marriages); financial stress or poverty; and poor behavioral, psychological, or educational outcomes.”
It's extremely unclear where the authors of Project 2025 got these statistics since they, conveniently, didn't cite their sources.
Later on, the authors provide a specific definition of family, nuclear or otherwise, that explicitly centers a hetero-patriarchal society. Project 2025 plainly states its support for, “marriage, healthy family formation, and delaying sex to prevent pregnancy” and proposes legislation to "strengthen marriages as the norm, restore broken homes, and encourage unmarried couples to commit to marriage." They even ask for federally-funded grants “to provide state-level high school education resources and curriculum on healthy marriages.”
Dare we ask what the Project considers “healthy marriages?"
Further restrictions on reproductive rights
We get these juicy little tidbits about the U.S. political hot potato issue in Project statements like “Abortion and euthanasia are not health care,” and “Abortion pills pose the single greatest threat to unborn children in a post-Roe world.”
In other words, abortion is wrong, and the question of leaving legality up to the states seems to be answered with a resounding no if Project 2025 becomes the nation's legislative guide.
A no-win game of US vs Them
Perhaps what's most unsettling about the calls-to-action in these documents (and to be sure there is plenty to find unsettle in any section of Project 2025) is the how incredibly regressive they are. Project 2025 seeks to return the United States to some past time, but this quest amounts to a wholesale negation of human evolution.
Yes, U.S. Federal policy is far from perfect, as is our evolution, but healthy debate should be at the center of a functioning democracy, and a democracy only functions if all citizens have equal rights. America has never quite gotten there, as any person with a marginalized identity can tell you, but less than a decade ago, we were closer than we are now, and we continue to backslide.
If Project 2025 becomes the law of the land, there may be no climbing out of that hole.
