How Project 2025 plans to reshape the American family

This is an adapted excerpt from the Aug. 11 episode of “Velshi.”

Project 2025, the authoritarian blueprint for dismantling federal agencies in the next Republican presidency, has a lot of thoughts on what your private relationships should look like and whom you should marry. 

In fact, a Christian nationalist vision of the family is a key centerpiece of the 922-page manual. It describes proposals for the American family as “central to the next conservative President’s agenda:"

According to Project 2025, not all families are created equal. On page 451, it defines the “right” kind of family as “a married mother, father, and their children.” It claims this is the “foundation of a well-ordered nation and a healthy society.”

Promoting this biblical concept of family is cited as a top-five goal for a revamped Department of Health and Human Services, which it criticizes for “having lost its way” by “promoting equity in everything we do.”

The document says efforts at promoting diversity should be repealed and replaced with policies that support what it calls the formation of “stable, married, nuclear families.”

In other words, the authors of Project 2025 believe they 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. They consider this not just a policy preference, but a core function of governance itself.

So much for limited government.

It should be noted that traditional families — people who are married with children — no longer make up the majority of family compositions in the U.S., according to recent polling by the Pew Research Center. This shift in family structures is due in part to more same-sex couples adopting children or starting their own families, reflecting the diverse and evolving landscape of today’s American society.

That diversity, according to the authors of Project 2025, poses a danger to “the very moral foundations of our society.” 

The document lays out several proposals for undermining the rights of those who don’t fit the biblical definition of a family. For instance, it wants the government to protect the right of businesses to discriminate against same-sex couples and says that federal grants should be made available to faith-based groups that refuse to recognize same-sex marriage, specifically, groups that, “affirm that marriage is between not just any two adults, but one man and one unrelated woman.”

While acknowledging that this would violate the Respect for Marriage Act, which bans discrimination against same-sex couples, the document nonetheless calls for the government to “protect faith-based grant recipients that maintain a biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family.”

Its policy proposals also demonize children raised in nontraditional households, stating, “Social science reports that assess the outcomes for children raised in homes aside from a heterosexual, intact marriage are clear: All other family forms involve higher levels of instability; financial stress or poverty; or poorer behavioral, psychological, or educational outcomes.”

Federally funded family planning clinics would be required to actively promote “the importance of marriage” which describes homes without a husband as “among the most dangerous places for a child to be.”

Offensive and bigoted terminology is casually passed off throughout its pages, including urging the next DHS secretary to put an end to “woke transgender activism.”

One especially alarming proposal is to criminalize transgender identity as pornography. This proposal likely takes its cue from Russia’s so-called gay propaganda bill passed in 2022, which bans all forms of what it refers to as LGBTQ “propaganda” and prohibits Russians from promoting same-sex relationships. Similarly, Project 2025 considers the “propagation of transgender ideology” to be pornography.

The document also mirrors similar rhetoric used by extremist groups such as Moms for Liberty to oppose drag queen reading hours and to keep LGBTQ+ books out of libraries. Just five pages into the foreword, the document states, “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.” It also classifies gender reassignment surgery as a form of child abuse.

To confront these “threats” to straight heterosexual couples, Project 2025 proposes economic incentives for traditional nuclear families, advocating for policymakers to “use government power, including through the tax code, to restore the American family.” By redirecting federal funding to support its biblical view of family, same-sex couples or other family structures would be denied equal benefits given to straight, heterosexual couples.

And the timeline for implementing all this? As soon as Donald Trump takes office, which the document assumes is a given. 

“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 America may be lost.  The next conservative President will enter office on January 20, 2025, with a simple choice: greatness or failure.”

This “very idea of America” seems to exclude the vast majority of American families today, most of whom don’t fit the Christian nationalist mold.

This post is part of “Inside Project 2025,” an ongoing series on MSNBC’s “Velshi.” Each week, host Ali Velshi explores some of the most outrageous proposals from the Heritage Foundation’s playbook for a second Trump presidency and explains how they could impact you. Read how Project 2025 would affect the gun crisis, federal disaster relief and international development.