Project 2025: What Is a Family?
And what its definition could mean for welfare assistance, the Respect for Marriage Act, no-fault divorce and more (Scroll to the end to listen)
Today’s focus: Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education Programs (HMRE)
What it is:
Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education (HMRE) Program. The HMRE program is part of the ACF Office of Family Assistance.
Project 2025, page 479
What Project 2025 supports within federally-funded HMRE programs:
Protect faith-based grant recipients from religious liberty violations and maintain a biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family. 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. For the sake of child well-being, programs should affirm that children require and deserve both the love and nurturing of a mother and the play and protection of a father. Despite recent congressional bills like the Respect for Marriage Act that redefine marriage to be the union between any two individuals, HMRE program grants should be available to faith-based recipients who affirm that marriage is between not just any two adults, but one man and one unrelated woman.
Project 2025, page 481
I almost stomped this fucking page when I read the words the love and nurturing of a mother and the play and protection of a father.
What does this Christian Nationalist language mean?
Christian Nationalists believe the Bible defines distinct marital roles for men and women.
The husband is the head of the home. From the Focus on the Family website: “The husband holds the role of spiritual leader. He’s called to initiate spiritual investments and is overall responsible for the spiritual health of his family. Husbands are called to be servant leaders, which means they make the welfare of their wives and families a priority.”
Wives must submit to their husbands. Again from Focus on the Family: “A wife’s role, on the other hand, is to respect and honor her husband. She’s meant to work alongside her husband to make their marriage succeed while allowing him to take the lead, especially when the two are in clear conflict.”
Obviously, the Project 2025 text seeks to undermine the Respect for Marriage Act. It also highlights the focus Christo-fascist Republicans will place on keeping heterosexual families intact.
Which is why I wasn’t surprised to read about Oklahoma Senate Bill 1958. From the 31 January 2024 online edition of The Oklahoman: “Senate Bill 1958 would remove incompatibility as a permissible ground for divorce, effectively abolishing no-fault divorce.”
Project 2025 specifically calls for federally funded HMRE programs to allow Christian Nationalist definitions of marriage and the family. It is yet another lever to force religious indoctrination upon program participants nationwide. We will return to this theme again and again.
What this language could mean for YOU:
The repeal of the Respect for Marriage Act could nullify same-sex marriages nationwide. (Don’t think that isn’t their goal with this language.)
A Republican President could sign an executive order or a Republican Congress could pass a law abolishing no-fault divorce nationwide. Often, incompatibility or irreconcilable differences are the only means by which women can divorce abusive partners. As any female domestic abuse survivor knows, it is very difficult to legally prove domestic abuse. This could trap women with their abusers for life.
Defining a mother’s role as “to love and nurture children” could make it even more difficult for women, and especially working mothers and women of color, to hold down jobs and compete in the workplace. Our society already heaps so much shame on mothers for their choices. This could set women back decades or more.
People seeking a divorce could be required to participate in taxpayer-funded religious indoctrination programs for their cases to proceed.
Divorced parents looking to re-negotiate their visitation schedules or child support payments could be required to partake of these same Christian Nationalist programs to have their requests considered.
And the no-fault divorce thing has been discussed quite a bit in Mississippi..... under the guise, false flag of " protecting the sanctity of marriage". Total Bullshit. The word-smithing they use on this topic is the exact same thing that the pro-birthers use around abortion. It's obvious they want to trap women in marriages - an equally bad outcome is the children that live in this terror. it's further compounded because the son often learns from his father and thinks it's OK..... and the daughter will learn from her mother that it's normal. so it just creates more dysfunction, generations of dysfunction.
I saw all of this on full display in the documentary Happy Shiny People.... about the Duggars and the IBLP cult. I have watched several documentaries about this type of stuff, I previously just referred to it as the quiverful movement but now I know it is way way more than that. The one thing I learned from Happy Shiny People is that the husband and wife have an actual contract, they talked about it on the documentary, the husband can physically punish the wife for being perceived as too independent or too outspoken or too obstinate,- for not passive enough. Spanking or making her kneel in the corner of the bedroom for 5 hours.
Can you tell me how the Jehovah Witness fit into this project 2025? Because they do not vote.