Project 2025 says marriage is ideal and natural for everyone.
Powerful people are trying to undo modern divorce laws.
We sometimes need to read between the lines of Project 2025. As far as I can tell, it doesn’t mention the word divorce. But we need to look closer, because people involved with Project 2025 want to undo 50 years of modern divorce law.
Back up. Who is writing this and why? Find out here. And here’s a quick explainer on why Project 2025 matters. As always, you can read this post with your eyes or with your ears, using the play button above. And remember, there’s a really cute dog at the end.
Image: vintage photo of a middle-aged woman in a dress and cat-eye glasses grimacing at the camera. She is sitting at a table covered with beer bottles and a man beside her is drinking a beer. Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash.
They’re pushing everyone into marriage, no matter what.
There’s one word Project 2025 uses a LOT, and that is marriage. The Heritage Foundation wants us to get married ASAP (only to someone of the opposite sex!), have kids, and stay married. Here are some quotes.
In the foreword to Project 2025, Kevin Roberts says that the “pursuit of happiness” is “found primarily in family—marriage, children, Thanksgiving dinners, and the like” (p. 13).
In Chapter 14, Roger Severino says “child support in the United States should strengthen marriage as the norm, restore broken homes, and encourage unmarried couples to commit to marriage” (p. 479).
On page 489, he says that the US Secretary of Health and Human Services should “proudly” say that “married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them.”
The Heritage Foundation believes marriage (with biological kids) is the only way, the natural way, for everyone to live. Now add this to what Heritage Foundation supporters and many Republicans are saying about divorce: specifically, no-fault divorce.
What IS no-fault divorce?
No-fault divorce is a legal change that happened state by state over the last few decades. No-fault divorce is also called unilateral divorce. That means that just one person can ask the court for a divorce, when in the past, both people had to agree. No-fault divorce also lets couples decide that they don’t want to be married anymore and it’s nobody’s fault: they just don’t get along like they expected. (Ronald Reagan signed the first no-fault divorce law in California in 1969.)
Getting a divorce used to be much harder: you had to prove in court that your husband or wife abused you, or cheated, or did other bad things. Just imagine how hard that might be if one person is being nasty and doesn’t want to let the other go.
No-fault divorce protects women.
No-fault divorce helps women get a divorce when they badly need one. Many abuse survivors start a no-fault divorce because they just want to get away safely. They don’t want to talk about the abuse in court or try to make their husband testify. About 20 years ago, the National Bureau of Economic Research found that no-fault divorce rescues women. In states where it was allowed, there were major drops in domestic violence. Fewer women were murdered by their husbands. And the suicide rate for women went down by 20 percent.
No-fault divorce is a good thing, especially for women and other people vulnerable to abuse. But a growing number of Republicans are trying to take it away.
No-fault divorce is in danger.
The Heritage Foundation has teamed up with many other groups to create and promote Project 2025, and there is a long list of people from those groups saying we should end no-fault divorce. There are also many Republican candidates for office, and elected officials (like Speaker of the House and Trump supporter Mike Johnson) who say they want to end no-fault divorce.
A senior research associate at the Heritage Foundation wrote an article criticizing no-fault divorce. In it, she admires the dictator Joseph Stalin for making divorce more difficult, and for making single people pay extra taxes. She also says some of the same things that Project 2025 says about parents and children, like this line: “No-fault divorce codified the belief that children neither need nor desire to be raised by both their mother and father.”
This sounds just like many parts of Project 2025, which says that every family should be a married mother and father and their biological children.
It’s wrong to force people to stay married.
It’s ok if you think divorce is wrong because of your religion or moral beliefs. You don’t have to get divorced! But it’s not right for the government to force those morals on everyone. The people who wrote Project 2025 want to force everyone into the same kind of family, and even if they don’t use the word divorce, you can easily tell that they want every couple to stay together, even if it’s wrong for them and their kids.
Don’t let them undo modern divorce laws. Check your voter registration now at Vote.org and vote for Democratic candidates who will let us make our own choices about family.
Congratulations, you made it to Ginny!
Image: Close-up photo of Ginny, a 12-pound Yorkie mix with scruffy black fur and long tan eyebrows, sitting and looking at the camera. The long fur on her head is swept to the side as if she’s an emo teen.