Project 2025: Use Temporary Assistance for Needy Families to Invade Sexual Privacy
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This week, we’ve been talking about how Christian Nationalists view sex and privacy. Readers who missed those posts can find links below.
Today, we cover a Project 2025 policy recommendation that implements this invasive view of sex and privacy: Using the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program to force low-income families into religious indoctrination and invasions of privacy for welfare assistance.
What TANF is:
TANF. The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program is a federal block grant that gives states significant flexibility to fund a broad array of programs aimed at helping low-income families break the cycle of poverty and achieve economic self-sufficiency. States use TANF to fund monthly cash assistance payments to low-income families with children as well as a wide range of services that include work activities, work supports and supportive services, child-care, administration and systems, tax credits, pre-K/Head Start, child welfare, and other services.
Project 2025, page 476
Project 2025 specifically calls for additional tracking of individuals using TANF.
To increase transparency, HHS should clarify how states, in their quarterly and annual reports, ought to track and audit the outcomes from how they spend TANF funds to meet the TANF program’s four statutory purposes.
Project 2025, page 476
The framers of Project 2025 aren’t shy about suggesting other “outcomes” to track. They state it clearly: TANF funds should go to people who are married; who have children that came from their union; and who did not have sex and get pregnant outside of wedlock, then refuse to marry.
Additionally, TANF priorities are not implemented in an equally weighted way. Marriage, healthy family formation, and delaying sex to prevent pregnancy are virtually ignored in terms of priorities, yet these goals can reverse the cycle of poverty in meaningful ways. CMS should require explicit measurement of these goals.
Project 2025, page 476
This is yet another way Christo-fascist Republicans could invade our privacy for purposes of punishing “sexual immorality.”
I don’t ever want to hear anyone say Republicans are the party of small government again. If they win in November and implement this policy position, it will be a big government/Big Brother nightmare.
To gather this data, a Christo-fascist Republican government would have to create yet another system to track activities most of us consider to be private: When and how often we have sex; with whom; whether or not we are married; and whether this sex results in a pregnancy.
It isn’t a stretch to imagine them denying TANF assistance to couples who live together but aren’t married; single parents (who would predominately be mothers); and those who got pregnant out of wedlock and are forced to carry those pregnancies to term.
Jane Addams one of the founders of social work advocated for the marginalized communities. They were and still are treated like poverty etc is self inflicted. There is tremendous evidence based practices that show its complex and society structures based. sickening. Backwards logic. It’s being revived.
Agreed I read the document from Rice University in Houston. Sigh 😔
https://www.bakerinstitute.org/research/texas-legislatures-assault-church-state-separation-schools