Fact Check: Project 2025 Says 'Only Valid Family' Is Married Parents and Their Children?

Claim:

Project 2025 says that "the only valid family is a working father married to a stay-at-home mother and their children."

Rating:

False ( About this rating? )

Context:

This quote did not appear in the Project 2025 document. However its authors claimed that "fatherlessness" was the cause of many social ills, and they wrote that a conservative government should promote "family stability" with a higher proportion of children who live with their married biological parents.

Ahead of the November 2024 U.S. presidential election, social media users who were scrutinizing Project 2025 — a conservative coalition's plan for a future Republican administration — began sharing the claim ( archived ) in July 2024 that it said "the only valid family is a working father married to a stay-at-home mother and their children."

The claim appeared several more times on X , as well as Threads , Facebook and TikTok . It referenced a page in the 887-page tome that outlined the group's top policy goals during what they hope will be former U.S. President Donald Trump's second term — a document titled "Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise — 2025."

Looking at Page 451, however, we could not find this exact sentence. A word search of the document revealed that this quote did not appear in it. We have therefore rated this claim "False."

The quote that circulated did seem to loosely paraphrase some of the points presented in Project 2025, which seeks to address a large number of perceived issues , including "the border crisis, inflation, a stagnant economy, and rampant crime," as well as China, schools, families and "the Deep State."

The stated goals regarding families place the "nuclear family" — a married man and woman and their biological children — at the center of U.S. society, arguing that protecting and promoting this model would be paramount (emphasis ours):

The most important community in each of our lives—and the life of the nation—is the family. (Page 4)

The pro-family promises expressed in this book, and central to the next conservative President's agenda, must go much further than the traditional, narrow definition of "family issues." Every threat to family stability must be confronted. (Page 5)

On Page 451, the authors clarify their opinion of the ideal family. "Families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society," they wrote.

This model, they argued, was endangered by policies that promoted "LGBTQ+ equity" that supposedly made it easier to choose single parenthood and made marriage a less-attractive option.

They added that "working fathers" were more protective of children than "non-related boyfriends" (emphasis ours):

Working fathers are essential to the well-being and development of their children, but the United States is experiencing a crisis of fatherlessness that is ruining our children's futures. In the overwhelming number of cases, fathers insulate children from physical and sexual abuse, financial difficulty or poverty, incarceration, teen pregnancy, poor educational outcomes, high school failure, and a host of behavioral and psychological problems. By contrast, homes with non-related "boyfriends" present are among the most dangerous place for a child to be. HHS [U.S. Department of Health and Human Services] should prioritize married father engagement in its messaging, health, and welfare policies.

While the document emphasized working fathers, it did not say anything about whether mothers should work.

One paragraph later, the authors added that biological ties between adults and children in a household were of the utmost importance, and that government policy should take this idea into account, especially as new assisted "reproductive technologies" arose (emphasis ours):

In the context of current and emerging reproductive technologies, HHS policies should never place the desires of adults over the right of children to be raised by the biological fathers and mothers who conceive them . In cases involving biological parents who are found by a court to be unfit because of abuse or neglect, the process of adoption should be speedy, certain, and supported generously by HHS.

According to the document, adoption should be offered as the primary choice to pregnant women who might seek an abortion (Page 6).

On this topic, Project 2025 also advocated for reform to protect "faith-based adoption agencies" that faced legal challenges due to their belief that children should go to married heterosexual couples. As a result, it calls for policies that remove "nondiscrimination conditions" based on sexual orientation and gender identity for grants to adoption agencies. It calls calls for the removal of impediments to adoption and foster care agencies that favored married couples as they assigned children to their "forever homes" (pages 477 and 478).

Opponents of this idea say it would end up affecting not just families that don't conform to the conservative ideal, but also families of other faiths and ethnic backgrounds.

Sources:

"Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise." The Heritage Foundation, 2023, thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf. Accessed 21 June 2024.

McCray, Rebecca. "A Jewish Couple Was Rejected as Foster Parents Because of Their Religion. This Is the Future Project 2025 Envisions." The Guardian, 24 July 2024. The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/24/project-2025-adoption-fostering.