The Heritage Foundation’s latest horrifying report: Saving America by Saving the Family (Part 1)

Transcript Transcribed by Laura M.

Courtney: Hello everyone and welcome back. My name is Courtney, I am here as always with my spouse Royce. Together we are The Ace Couple and also, as always, we are fuming about the Heritage Foundation. Yes, that’s right. Our friends are back at it again with an all new report entitled Saving America by Saving the Family: A foundation for the next 250 years. Now, for those of you who listen to – at this point it’s getting old, but it’s aging like fine wine – our four-part episode on the religious right-wing attack on asexual marriage via their ideas about what a family should look like, what a marriage needs to look like. For all of you who listened to those episodes before you listen to this one, I need someone to put together a bingo card. Because I think, what? That was maybe 2022 when we made that four part series?

Royce: I believe it started in August. Yes, 2022.

Courtney: As I was skimming through this report preparing my thoughts for what this episode might be, a few key phrases came up that were not even in that original letter to Mitch McConnell condemning the Respect for Marriage Act. These are little statements and phrases that were in all of the personal blogs and articles of the 83 religious right-wing organizations that co-signed this letter. Many of which we heard from you, our listeners, were points that you have never heard laid out in so explicit of terms. And I know tons of you were shocked upon hearing these episodes. But here we are now in this the year 2026, we have the Heritage Foundation back at it again, using a few of those really funky phrases that I called a lot of attention to.

Courtney: So please, if anyone does have a bingo card, get it ready. And we’re just gonna dive into this. We’re gonna start reading, we’re gonna pick some key points and talk about our thoughts. The preface reads: “To end America’s family crisis, poly– To end America’s family crisis, policymakers and civic leaders should treat restoring the family home as a matter of justice. Driven by two truths. The first is that all children have a right to the affection and protection of the man and woman who created them. The second is that the ideal environment in which to exercise this right is in a loving and stable home with their married biological parents.” That’s the preface. That’s how they’re coming out of the gate with this.

Royce: So no surprises. They have workshopped their wording, so they’re saying a lot with fewer words now.

Courtney: Yeah, the thing is, they have taken every bit of, like, their extremely conservative religiosity that we were reading in those blogs that you could tell were written for their in-group, people who already believe the way they believe, preaching to the choir, so to speak. And when you read those blogs as an outsider who doesn’t hold those values, sometimes it’s really baffling to see the lengths to which they will go. Like, I know a lot of our listeners were shocked at how heavily emphasized sex and procreation was in this brand of conservative marriage by definition. But when you really dig into what they’re saying, they are saying it all over. They took all of the same logic that we have been reading and talking about and investigating for years, and they restate it here, sometimes with old wording, sometimes with new, but then they actually give policy proposals for the government – much like Project 2025 – saying, “Here’s what we believe in why, and here’s what we want the government to do about it.”

Courtney: But I do like how they’re really leaning into this whole, like, Happy anniversary America. Because we’re coming up on the 250th anniversary of America. And they really want to just say, you know all the progress we’ve made in 250 years? We should go back and undo it and stay that way for the next 250 years. And they lit– this is literally how they start. This is how goofy it is. [reading] “On July 4th, 2026, Americans will remember how the Founding Fathers won their freedom and established ordered liberty through a system of limited government federalism and the rule of law. In understanding their crowning achievement, Americans must recognize that the Founding Fathers were, quite literally, fathers. 54 of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence married, and had a total of 337 children among them, an average of six each. Thus, when the men and women of the revolution sacrificed their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to secure the blessings of liberty – quote – for our posterity, it was their children.”

Courtney: So we’re off to a great start. This is a new spin on it. Like you hear these brands of politics that are very much like, well, the founding fathers wanted this. But I– I do gotta hand it to them. I think this is the first time I’ve heard, “Remember, the founding fathers were literal fathers. They actually had children. Therefore, we all need to also have children.” So, of course, we hear a whole lot of the, quote, ‘biological truths’ that we hear not only used in anti-trans talking points, but also anti-ace talking points. They call it a stubborn fact of human nature that, quote, “It takes one fertile man and one fertile woman to reproduce. One knows from universal experience that children are best raised in homes with their married mothers and fathers.” We essentially have the politicized version of the religious jargon we were discussing back in 2022.

Courtney: Because whereas that was very much one man and one woman in a marriage that they have sex in and produce babies, because if they don’t, the entire civilization will collapse because this is what God wanted. God wanted us to do this. So the world will just simply end if we don’t keep doing this. Now they– they say basically: government will collapse if we don’t do this. [reading] “The family is the foundation of civilization and marriage, the committed union of one man and one woman, is its cornerstone. It is the seedbed of self-government. The home is where fathers, mothers, and their children cultivate virtue and practice cooperation, responsibility, stewardship, and self-reliance. Without families, a country cannot create meaningful work and prosperity. It lacks a storehouse of strong and brave men to protect itself from hostile aggressors at home and abroad. It lacks even the ingredients for responsible citizenship itself, without which no republic is possible.”

Courtney: Then they go on, you know, blah blah blah, even though communists are bad, even Stalin had a point. Even Stalin knew that a strong family was a good thing. One funny thing, and of course for anybody who is as masochistic as I am, I’ll put a link to this actual report in our show notes so that you can read all 168 pages if you want, but I do like how many like founding fathers or philosophers or foreign leaders that they cite throughout this, but it’s all in the name of a very roundabout way of saying Americans aren’t getting married as often as they used to, and they aren’t having as many babies as they used to. And this is bad. And here’s what we need to do to change that. And here’s the culprit. Here’s the problem why these things started in the first place, including but not limited to second wave feminism and abortion and welfare to name a few.

Courtney: Although the one thing that has me a little bit tickled– Because of course we’ve talked about the pronatalists on a number of occasions now, you can go back and listen to those episodes if you haven’t heard them yet. And we’ve briefly touched on the fact that in some ways, the pronatalists and the religious right-wing do intersect in some of their goals, but they also have a few differences that they clash on. And this report absolutely takes a few shots at the pronatalists. And I kind of love it. The girls are fighting. They take a shot–Like, tell me this is not directly aimed at Elon Musk. So they’re here talking about how bad it is that we don’t have more babies, you know, etc., etc. Population collapse. When they say: “The only way for America to thrive in future generations is to rebuild the family, and that can happen only with a societal commitment to revive the institution of marriage.” So that’s where they stand.

Courtney: They note that, “Some recognize the extreme gravity of the crisis and recommend extraordinary technical solutions. These include mass subsidies for IVF, egg freezing, and genetic screening combined with a market for babies where people – usually men of means – contractually create many children across many partners or surrogates. The ultimate end of this form of –quote – ‘pronatalism’ envisions a world of artificial wombs and custom-ordered, lab-created babies on demand.” But oh no no no, the writers of this paper at the Heritage Foundation do not like this. No no no, why do they not like it? Well, [reading] “Such an approach intentionally denies a right due to every child conceived to be born and grow in relationship with his or her mother and father bound in marriage.” I love how every time they have to say mother and father it’s either like bound in marriage, or like fertile mother and fertile father. It is just consistently extremely weird. Very weird of them. But it really underscores how much they feel that their idea of marriage, that being a sexual and procreative one, needs to be incentivized in the law for every single American.

Royce: Well, not ‘every single’ because he said they were anti-welfare.

Courtney: Well, yeah, that’s the thing, because they don’t see single Americans, they see families and people who need to create families. And that’s the thing, too. They rarely just say family. In this report, they like to say the natural family, which, you know, means one fertile mother and one fertile father. And their minimum two children. So they present that their proposals for governmental policy follow three broad imperatives. One, stop punishing family formation. Two, restore the American dream. And three, support marriage and working families. And mind you [sighs] I’m gonna need to back up a little bit here. I’m getting ahead of myself. Because I told you to make Bingo cards.

Courtney: Earlier here, when they’re trying to explain why all of this theory is so important, they break out one of my least favorite phrases for their framework for what they think marriage and therefore the backbone, end all be all of society ought to be. They use that old phrase, ‘consent-based’, which those of you who were here for our four-part series on religious conservative discriminations and frameworks know that the Heritage Foundation and folks like them believe, and I quote, “Marriage should be conjugal, not consent-based.” If that sounds disgusting and awful, good, it ought to. But when they’re here blaming feminism for, and I quote, “Natural family becoming stigmatized,” I really don’t know what world they’re in. Are there fewer people getting married, especially at younger ages right now? Yes. Is a mother and a father who want to have kids stigmatized in society right now? I really don’t think they know what that word means.

Royce: I mean, that’s just feeding into the broader persecution complex that we often see from these sort of extremist groups.

Courtney: It really is. And hopefully this paper will illustrate a little more about why they think that way, because these are the arguments that they’re using in proposed legislation. And we have talked about time and time again when we went over Project 2025, when we talked about the Heritage Foundation and 80 plus organizations like them previously, how they do have a seat at the table in a lot of these lawmaking conversations. But they blame second wave feminism, the sexual revolution, child free, marriage free, quote, they put it in scare quotes, ‘liberation’ [reading] “That promise to lead to an unparalleled era of consent-based human happiness and fulfillment.” Now, having read their previous articles about what they really think about that consent-based phrase, I know that they explicitly state that a conjugal view of marriage should inform the law. They say here, and I quote, “It unites spouses at all levels of their being: hearts, minds, and bodies where man and woman form a two-in-one flesh union.”

Royce: Flesh union sounds something out of, like, a body horror fiction.

Courtney: Sounds horrific to me! And in this Heritage Foundation article, which I’ll also– I’ll go ahead and re-link it for those of you who haven’t read it when we linked it previously, they talk about how policies like no-fault divorce replace the conjugal view of marriage and how that’s a problem. This article I’m citing, by the way, published in 2014, over a decade ago. So that is the kind of thing that does bother me a little bit. When big policy proposal papers like this come out, and everyone seems shocked and horrified and– where did this come from? It’s not out of the blue. It’s not even much, if any, of an escalation from things they have already been saying and pushing for for decades. And previously, when I would talk about people like this and what they think and what they’re saying and pushing for, I’d often be shrugged off like, “Oh, those are just extremists. No one’s going to pay any attention to them.” And now here we are. Because not only is this view of marriage extremely religious, a religion that not all Americans share, if you can believe it.

Royce: Not even all the Christian ones.

Courtney: Not even all the Christian ones believe these particular sets of ideologies. But it’s extremely idealistic because they say that the family unit is, quote, “an inherent good.” And they really love talking about sacrifice. And the idea of sacrifice, sacrificing for the sake of those you love for your family isn’t inherently a bad thing, but that’s one where like in the context of a family unit, like, maybe compromise is better. Like we’ve often talked about the critique about how, you know, in this traditional family setup, a mother is normally the one who is most expected to sacrifice. Sacrifice herself, her time, her happiness. But they say here, “It is an inherent good based on the commitment and sacrifice of husbands and wives for each other’s sake and for the sake of children that their union would welcome into the world.”

Courtney: [reading] “This path is associated with the view that all life is sacred, and that sees the family as a source of fulfillment for adults because they direct their energies to the good of the family unit instead of to themselves alone. Underlying this view is a deep sense of gratitude in knowing that human beings are here by God’s grace and that children are divine gifts.” If you think that, fine and great. But I was always raised to be told that we live in a country that has a separation of church and state. I know that doesn’t mean anything in today’s day and age politically. So I do always find it mildly amusing when an inherently religious framework uses very simplistic, like scientific metaphors to try to illustrate their point. Because here as they’re talking about how the American family dissolved and why it must be restored, they say: “The natural family is the cell of the social body. And no body can survive the death and decay of its cells.”

Royce: Yeah, science has been pick and choose for a long time, particularly if it becomes, I guess, politicized. Even like within thinking of the church as sometimes a political unit. And I know that here in America, we’re broadly, oftentimes speaking of Protestant factions, but I believe it was in the year 1900 when the Catholic Church said science and religion are not at odds with each other. Like one does not disprove the other.

Courtney: Wow, 1900. What a time. What a time to be alive. So alongside, I mean, religion and politics, there’s also this odd third branch of morality that every group tries to flame their framework is moral. One really glaring hypocrisy in this paper, if I were to just pick one, if I were to pick my favorite hypocrisy in this paper, they say in the intro that this report casts no moral judgment on individuals. And yet, it goes on to state: “To understand the current family crisis, one must begin at the beginning. No child can naturally come into existence without a biological mother and father. This biological fact is inseparable from a moral fact.” They haven’t said people who are trans are immoral. They haven’t said people who are gay are immoral. They haven’t said people who may be asexual are immoral. And yet this whole biological fact, biological mother, biological father, the natural family, the procreative family, this is a moral fact.

Courtney: And this is interesting, and we are gonna need to keep an eye on it, because from our point of view, politicians, policies, marriage laws, tax laws, very often are heavily geared towards marriage for Americans. And anytime there is this moral political outrage, honestly from either side, more often on the right, they always decry, like, family values, family values. This paper doesn’t think family values actually does enough. They say: “For decades politicians have talked about family values, but where are the policies explicitly defending marriage and family as good in themselves?” So I do think that at least from conservative politicians, we’re going to start moving away from hearing the blanket phrase family values, and I think they are going to start using things more explicitly, like the natural family, the biological mother and father. Even just saying marriage or the marital unit, I think we’re going to be hearing things like that become increasingly more common in place of family values.

Courtney: Because after they talk about this biological and moral fact, they say these are not just abstract truths. A family headed by a child’s married mother and father is the best context for bearing and raising that child. Not only do they want married biological mothers and married biological fathers, but they want them to marry earlier. They say couples who marry earlier in their early 20s are more fertile and tend to have more children than those who marry later, say in their mid to late 30s. As a consequence, if more people marry earlier, that will likely boost the married fertility rate and alleviate a multitude of social problems. And this is like… [sighs] I know they have reasons to push for the things they’re pushing for. I know they have these religiously based arguments, and they try to make it political and factual by picking and choosing the things that back up their cause, but like truthfully, truthfully, do they know? Do they know how evil they sound? Do they know?

Royce: Most villains in most stories don’t understand that they are the evil ones.

Courtney: They go on to say, right after talking about how people need to get married earlier so they can have more children, they do this other, like, well, culturally, let’s analyze why we’re in this problem. Why are we in this predicament where they aren’t having as many babies as we want them to have? [reading] “First, many of the past incentives to have large families are gone. For instance, far fewer Americans live and work on farms in 2025 than they did in 1825 or 1925. Few married couples now think of the labor potential of children on a farm or in the local coal mine.”

Royce: I mean, this is the political party who has been advocating for child labor in factories.

Courtney: And for coal! I don’t think people realize how on the nose those two policies, like, intersect with one another in their ideology.

Royce: So it’s okay for popular culture to start having, like, 80s or 90s nostalgia. But conservative groups can’t have coal mine nostalgia. That’s too far back. We passed it.

Courtney: It’s too far back! It’s not allowed! We can send 1980s children to the Upside Down, but we cannot send 1880s children to the fucking coal mines!

Royce: Has anyone ever said the sentence seriously, “Ah, the good old days, the coal mines.”?

Courtney: If anyone has earnestly said that, as someone who has in any way actually experienced the coal mines, I want to have a long afternoon with that person. I want to just listen to that person talk.

Royce: I’d be more concerned about them having a long afternoon with a medical professional about, like, inhalation and exposure and everything from down in the mines.

Courtney: They also, after talking about, like, “Well, you know, we don’t have as much child labor anymore, so that’s part of the reason why people aren’t having as many kids.” They also then talk about how infant mortality rate has dropped and life expectancy has gone up. And wow, that just– that argument– that point, that acknowledgement is really painful when they’re now depriving children of life-saving vaccines and, you know, reworking the food pyramid so that fucking steak is on the top. They say, you know, in addition to that, the number and perceived quality of activities or opportunities has skyrocketed, especially for women. And that’s something that the pronatalists have also said. They’re like, “In countries that have higher qualities of life and more opportunities for women, they have fewer children.” And yet they still think fewer children is a problem to be addressed.

Courtney: I do love a little bit how at odds the Heritage Foundation has now become with the pronatalist movement, because they’re both loud, they’re both obnoxious, they’re both wrong and heavily influential in politics right now. But I do kind of love that the girls are fighting. I do want to get a little bowl of popcorn and just just watch the girls fight it out.

Courtney: So after going through this thought experiment of all of the very true and accurate reasons why people have fewer kids now than they used to, they also say: “A large share of the blame for the present malady lies in moral and cultural trends that have both fed and been fed by government policy. Chief among these is surely the Sexual Revolution, which separated the sex act from marriage and childbearing.”

Courtney: So I’m sure people who are not reading this with an asexual framework would just say like, you know, premarital sex, that’s what they’re railing against. And that’s one of the things that they don’t like, for sure. But time and time again, when we were going through the blogs and articles and papers and thinkpieces for these religious, political, right-wing organizations, they kept saying marriage and sex and procreation are all synonymous. These three things are one and the same. They should not be separated. And yes, on the one hand, the more common thing we hear in daily culture, daily society, is like the premarital sex thing. Right? But what doesn’t get talked about on as large of a scale but is absolutely written about time and time again amongst these organizations is that marriage and sex and procreation are one and the same.

Courtney: They’ll use marriage and procreation to be one of their many talking points for why they don’t believe in homosexual marriage, but they will also use marriage and sex, and by extension procreation, as a reason why they rail against platonic marriage, why they write these articles about how friends can’t get married, these queerplatonic marriages are terrible. And I really think the only reason why this hasn’t become a bigger political talking point or a bigger conversation amongst the queer community is because people by and large just don’t care as much about the asexual community. Some of it is not caring. A lot of it is like what I said previously, where we speak up about how, hey, we are under attack, we are under this political and social pressure, and people will be like, “Eh, calm down. It’s not that deep, it’s not that big of a deal.” So people will brush it off.

Courtney: They’ll also come into it with their own pre-existing framework, and they’ll read a sentence like this, and without digging deeper or going into the ideologies that we are exposed to because they directly impact us and our lives, they’ll really just latch on to the lowest common denominator, the things they’ve already heard, the things they’ve already been attacked with: the gay marriage, more– increasingly more talking about trans issues, which is absolutely good and we should be, but then things like premarital sex, sex outside of marriage. Because they’ve heard these talking points before, they are more comfortable with them. Gosh, I’ll see if I can find this article to link it to. I know I linked it when we were talking about it in the past. I just don’t have it in front of me right now. But I will never forget the article railing against platonic marriage, saying that platonic marriage is the inevitable conclusion, the bottom of the slippery slope. The slippery slope was like gay marriage, right? And they’re like, so this platonic marriage is the natural conclusion of the slippery slope we’ve already been on.

Courtney: They go on to also blame technology and policy, like the pill and other contraceptives. What terrible technology. And then, oh hey, there’s no-fault divorce laws, just like they’ve been railing against for decades. Imagine that, making it into this paper. They similarly blame the, quote, “perverse incentives of the welfare state,” and then the LGBTQ agenda. They go on to spout a little more nonsense about how you know, in a rational society we wouldn’t have to define these words, but a mother is a female parent and a father is a male parent. And here’s another one for those bingo cards: [reading] “Men and women are not interchangeable. No. Men and women have natural complementary differences.” That ‘complementary differences’ bugs me so much because they don’t go into it as explicitly in a paper like this, but five, ten years ago, we know that they will use that time and time again to talk about biological sex and their biblical understanding of how, you know, God’s first commandment was go forth and procreate.

Courtney: So these like ‘complementary differences’ might not be as overt right here in the way they’re using it, but I’ve absolutely read articles and blogs by them where they are just using it as sex, and a male and a female go together and become one flesh. They are naturally complementary in their differences like a lock and a key. And they just tip-toe around this. Basically, basically, I need everyone to understand when this kind of person says there are complementary differences, they’re talking about penis and vagina. That is what they are doing. That is what they are doing. So as if they haven’t defined marriage time and time again by what they think it should be– Or not even what they think it should be. This is the camp of people who are like, “God created marriage. We don’t even get to decide what marriage is, because God decided, and I know exactly what God decided that it is.”

Courtney: They say marriage, in its essence, is the formal social recognition of two truths. First, it takes one fertile male and fertile one female to bear children. Which, if that’s what marriage is, do people who even maybe want kids but are infertile, do they just not get to marry?

Royce: It sounds like all marriages also end at menopause.

Courtney: Everyone needs to get divorced during menopause. It’s required. This marriage is no longer procreative. And yet, in the same paper where they were railing against platonic marriage, they were also railing against time-bound marriages. But this is a built-in time-bound marriage based on their definitions!

Royce: It’s also– and I know why they’re doing this, but it’s frustrating to hear someone say, “In order to have a child, you need a sperm and an egg.” Like, no one’s arguing against that.

Courtney: No. No one’s arguing against that.

Royce: That’s how it works.

Courtney: So if that’s the first truth of marriage, the second truth: Children should be raised in a stable home by their married mother and father.

Royce: Does that mean any traditional family unit that could be described as instable due to, I don’t know, verbal or physical domestic violence or various ways of child abuse are now no longer married?

Courtney: I– I don’t know. I don’t know.

Royce: I feel like the percentage of people that I know that are no longer communicating with their parents come from such an environment.

Courtney: Yeah. And that also, like, it really does lead to so many other questions, right? Because I know they hate divorce, even when it’s a mutually decided upon divorce. So if they want that to be out of the question, all right, let’s say a mother– Oh, sorry, a biological mother who has a natural family with her biological husband. If he dies in the coal mine, are we going so biblical that she, like, now needs to marry his brother? And that’s another reason why we need so many children because people need enough siblings to remarry any and all widows?

Royce: Gotta keep it in the family.

Courtney: Gotta keep it in the family! Family values. We can’t even say family values anymore because it’s marriage. It’s sexual marriage.

Courtney: They add a lot of charts about, look, fewer people are getting married and people who do get married are getting married later. And they do sneak in in the commentary amidst these charts, things that anyone reading with a critical lens can poke so many holes through or directly, like, counteract previous things they said. Because remember, they use the word stigmatized for family and marriage. They said it is stigmatized in today’s society. And yet amidst these charts, they even admit that while marriage rates have greatly declined, they still say most Americans still marry at some point in today’s day and age. They admit today most Americans still marry at some point.

Courtney: If people are doing it, it doesn’t seem so heavily stigmatized now, does it? And their slant is very– it’s wild because they say, they’ll admit certain things that we quote and see as positive, such as divorce rates are down. That should be a good thing. And they say, while it was welcome news that divorce rates trended downward, and then leveled, quote, “Underneath this trend lurked a troubling fact: fewer Americans than ever before get married in the first place.” Yeah, maybe that’s because lots of people were getting married before that shouldn’t have. Maybe it’s just a good thing. Maybe it’s just a good thing. Maybe instead of trying to say there should be more marriages, or fewer marriages, or more kids, or fewer kids, I really just wish we could all agree that everybody who wants to get married should have access to marriage and they should be able to have as few or as many kids as they want. It is baffling that that is controversial.

Courtney: They go on to talk about dropping below replacement. How of course if a married couple isn’t having at least two children that they are not replacing themselves. And how it’s bad. And how COVID-19 really aggravated the problem, which makes a heck of a lot of sense. They even cite how researchers expected births to decline in response to the 2008 recession, but that those same researchers expected birth rates to recover as the economy improved. Because there are times throughout American history where birth rates were heavily influenced by economic growth. And yet it does continue to decline. COVID-19 being one of those reasons. But certainly, I would argue, not the only one. And I actually got a book that I’ve been meaning to talk about, and I’m sure we will at some point, because this is going to continue to be an ongoing conversation, whether it’s a political push from the pronatalist or whether it’s a religious push from the Heritage Foundation in their ilk.

Courtney: The book I got was called Decline and Prosper: Changing Global Birth Rates And The Advantages Of Fewer Children, which I think is fascinating, certainly coming at it from an angle that these conversations are not usually approached from. But an enormous part of the problem, and one of the reasons why we have so many of these, like billionaires, the Elon Musk’s, the pronatalist couple who are extremely wealthy, you know, the elites who are procreating to save the world and whatever such nonsense. Our entire foundation, our country, our economy, our society, are all predicated on this idea that is hinging on constant growth. This capitalistic idea that line can and should continue to go up. And if we can just continue to make the line go up, things will keep getting better. And all I’m saying is we’ve really got to develop a different framework. We really do.

Courtney: It is not sustainable to assume that our economy, and by extension, as a necessity if our economy is going to continue to grow, that we need more people, we need more workers, we need more children’s slaves in the coal– in the coal mines. Like instead of defending this aggressively evil form of capitalism and trying to influence birth rates through governmental policies, in order to try to defend a flawed and dying system, what if we just got creative and developed a new framework? I know it is so much more to hope for than is possibly feasible in this day and age. But I have just never seen a governmental policy trying to influence the number of children people have, whether they’re trying to influence more children or fewer, I have never seen a policy like that–

Royce: Actually work?

Courtney: –be good, be healthy, make for happier people? At a certain point, we’ve got to let people be people and stop being slaves to the system and instead create a system that works for the people, that meets us where we are in our modern lives right now.

Courtney: They then go on to cite a study, which I am immensely skeptical of, because I’ve seen a lot of studies to the contrary, where they actually calculate that raising a family today costs slightly less than it did in 1985. They think it would actually be financially easier for middling incomes to raise a family today than it was 40 years ago, even if that family only had one breadwinner. And that’s just– it is just untrue. The lower class especially, people working minimum wage jobs, or even above minimum wage, it’s been so stagnant for so long, nobody in this country can get a two-bedroom apartment for minimum wage anymore. There’s just absolutely no way.

Courtney: But in citing this study and economics and culture, they also kind of just go on to talk about how, you know, parents these days want more for their kids, and they cite that almost as a bad thing. They’re like, oh, well, you know, if someone wants multiple kids today, they want a house where each kid can have their own room. Parents used to not worry about that. Kids used to share rooms all the time. People are now parenting in terms of quality over quantity. And this is what really gets me. They go on to talk about the Brady Bunch as a really good example. If my memory serves, one of them was a widower, the other one was almost certainly divorced, but given the time it was on TV, they didn’t really talk about it in as explicit of terms. But that was definitely like a dad of three kids and a mom of three kids are combining households now.

Royce: Uh, yes. Mike and Carol, the parents each had three children and then married each other.

Courtney: Yeah. And yet, for all their talk of intact families – and yes, that’s the phrase they use, intact families – the Brady Bunch is certainly not it. And yet here they’re talking about how the Brady’s were prosperous upper middle class Californians who could afford family vacations in Hawaii. [reading] “Yet the three boys shared a single small bedroom, as did the three girls. What is more, all of the kids shared a single bathroom.” And they’re basically doing a like, ah, the good old days, the Brady Bunch.

Royce: Who is gonna tell this person that sitcoms are not real?

Courtney: I don’t know. Plus, if we actually– Oh my gosh, do we know what the Brady Bunch house is? Look that up, ’cause I know there’s like the Full House house just sold for X millions of dollars. Like–

Royce: Oh, did they not use, like, a set piece?

Courtney: I don’t know. Look it up. Do we know what the Brady Bunch house is?

Royce: Well, it does say that the– It does say that Mike was an architect and that they were in a large two-story house that he designed in an LA suburb.

Courtney: Okay, okay, okay. I found this from 2023: “Move over, Carolyn Mike Brady. There’s a new owner of a certain mid-century home.” The exterior property that was used for the Brady Bunch home has been sold for $3.2 million. And that’s at a 9% loss from what it was purchased as a few years previously. So everyone’s like, “Wow, 3.2 million? That’s kind of low.”

Royce: The show also had a live-in housekeeper, which is not something someone lower or middle class would dream of.

Courtney: No! So to properly illustrate just how out of touch the people doing this paper are, like, you have to be extraordinarily wealthy to be able to afford that home in the first place, to be able to raise any number of kids in this house in the first place. But the idea of, “Your kids don’t all need their own bedroom,” they aren’t telling multi-millionaires that. That’s not the kind of person they’re talking about or thinking about this policy. They’re talking or trying to talk to, like, middle class Americans, being like, “What’s the matter with you? Why don’t you just shove three kids in the same bedroom and call it a day? You might not be able to afford a bigger house, but you can fill it to the brim with more kids. Pack them in like sardines. Why not? Kids are too spoiled these days. Why do kids think they need their own bedroom?”

Courtney: Which is still just an incredibly wild thing to say when there are so many Americans who just the prospect of buying a home of any size is just so far out of reach for them right now and in the foreseeable future because of the economic crisis we’re in for the middle and lower classes. And yet they argue that this is simply a matter of, quote, “unrealistic expectations for parents.” Do I think there are situations where multiple family members sharing small spaces, sharing bathrooms, sharing bedrooms can be healthy and functioning and good? Absolutely. Do I think it’s a problem in the wealthiest country in the world that there are people who just hope for other options and want better for their prospective children? Like that’s– I don’t see that as a problem. I really, really do not. And it is a slap in the face to all the Americans who cannot afford a home to just say, “You don’t need more space. You just need more kids. You just need more kids. No matter what your situation is, no matter what you can or can’t afford, just keep having children. That’ll make it better.”

Courtney: And every now and then they throw in a good point that I agree with, they always have to add a slant to it that I don’t, but they talk about things that make it easier to raise children, such as developing civic infrastructure that supports it with playgrounds and organized family activities. That’s great. I love that. Let’s have that conversation about how we can have more public spaces that are free, easy to access, walkable, child-friendly. Like all of these things, very good, but the slant that they put it in are like, well, places with overwhelming populations of Latter-day Saints, devout Catholics, or Orthodox Jews have these things. So I know that instead of keeping it to a civic infrastructure conversation, they’re going to make it based in religion. And for as much as the girls fighting, the pronatalists said that too. Go back and listen to our pronatalist episodes if you missed those ones. Even they – with all of their technological futuristic eugenics – they still want religion to play an outsized role in all public policy going forward.

Courtney: So I do think that’s where we’re going to end the episode for today. But we are certainly not done talking about this paper. There is so much more to dig into. So tune in next week to hear a little more about that. In the meantime, if you just simply cannot contain yourself and you want to torture yourself more with these policy proposals, you can read this paper as well as any of the articles we’ve referenced in the show notes on our website as well as the description box on YouTube. But for now we are going to leave you off as always with our featured MarketplACE vendor of the week: Ryn and Twin, where you can find apparel, accessories, and trinkets inspired by your favorite TV shows, film, manga, art, and anime. I myself have gotten a button from this shop, so I also know – somewhat relevant to today’s discussion – there are some products here that have to do with public health, a little bit of politics.

Courtney: For example, there is a red cap that says ‘Make the CDC competent again’ and boy, wouldn’t that be nice? You can also find some jewelry, some photography, wall art, and even clothing. There are cute little graphic t-shirts with a little raccoon, says Team Trash Panda. I personally love these handmade skirts. They have a bunch of cool nerdy designs. We’ve got Star Wars, we’ve got Mario, My Little Pony. And even if you aren’t looking for fandom stuff or graphic clothing, there are some beautiful handmade kimono jackets if you’re just looking for some handmade fashion by an asexual creator. Links to check out Ryn and Twin are in all of the usual places. And once again, thank you all so much for being here and we’ll go ahead and see you next time. Ba-bye.