The Heritage Foundation, the right-wing, religious-based organization responsible for Project 2025, has issued a new report focused on the family, with devastating guidance targeting LGBTQ+ families out of existence.
“The family is the foundation of every healthy society, and, tragically, the American family is on the brink,” the new report’s authors claim. “We are dangerously close to being unable to reverse the decline. Our country will not survive if families continue to crumble at this rate.”
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“There are very few people who are going to fall into what this report considers to be a good family,” Jessica Waters, senior scholar in residence in the Department of Justice, Law and Criminology at the American University’s School of Public Affairs, told the American Independent about the new report.
Project 2025 has guided much of the second Trump administration’s policy agenda, including erasing transgender identity from the federal government, rebranding federal law to exclude protections for trans and nonbinary people, prosecuting pro-trans educators and librarians as sex offenders, and ending Medicare coverage for gender-affirming care. Many of Project 2025’s anti-LGBTQ+ goals have already been accomplished.
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But another aim in the original Project 2025 document is the focus of the new report, titled “Saving America by Saving the Family“: prioritizing heterosexual families and children in government policy.
Similar to their attacks on transgender identity in Project 2025, the group’s goal with the new report is the erasure of LGBTQ+ families. A 29-post thread on the new report details its goals.
“The LGBTQ agenda… through the Supreme Court of the United States, redefined marriage and severed it in law from its natural biological function and purpose of reproduction,” the report states.
But “Marriage exists to bring a man and a woman together as husband and wife to be father and mother to any children their union produces,” the authors assert. “Mothers are female parents and fathers are male parents.”
By that logic, same-sex parents are excluded from the Heritage Foundation’s definition of family, and the Supreme Court’s decision granting marriage equality in 2015 has contributed to the “crisis” the real American family needs “saving” from.
It’s a theme — in addition to the subservience of women — that informs all of the report’s policy goals.
High on that list is a strict “biological” definition of parenthood, which would exclude married and single gay parents if they have no “biological” relationship to their children.
A redefined family tax credit would explicitly bar same-sex couples with a requirement that “both the tax-filing adults claiming the credit are the biological parents of the child in question.” That credit is worth $17,670 in 2026.
NEST college savings accounts for future education would be limited to only those who qualify for the redefined family tax credit, barring same-sex parents from that tax benefit as well.
The same holds true for the adoption credit, which would effectively favor biological reproduction over adoption for same-sex couples, one of the primary means of same-sex family creation.
Another is surrogacy, which the authors describe — echoing Pope Francis’ denunciation — as “despicable.” The report advocates for a global ban on the practice.
“Commercial surrogacy… always intentionally deprives a child of the birth mother… treats a child and the surrogate as means to the ends and desires of adults,” they write.
The authors also go after the “tendentious and subjective concept” of gender identity in their defense of “authentic” families.
The authors claim that “mothers are female parents and fathers are male parents,” and assert that, “The recent and incoherent concept of ‘gender identity’ — a supposed ‘internal sense of gender’ that can be incongruent with the body — does not change these biological facts.”
The report states that anything other than the “traditional,” “hierarchical” concept of family is antithetical to its success. The report advocates for government policies that “favor natural marriage over same-sex and polyamorous relationships, cohabitation, or intentional single parenthood.”
All of the policy recommendations continue and amplify similar attacks on the LGBTQ+ community initiated by Project 2025.
“If we want to secure the Golden Age of America, we must have bold solutions like those in this report that lay the foundation for stronger families,” the authors say in their introduction, echoing Donald Trump’s gilded, alarmist, and ultimately hollow pitch to his supporters.
“Strong families build strong communities, churches, schools, and businesses,” the report adds. “Without them, freedom cannot last.”
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