Saving America by Saving the Family (Part 2)

Transcript Transcribed by Laura M.

Courtney: Hello everyone and welcome back. My name is Courtney. I’m here with my spouse Royce. Together we are The Ace Couple and we are back for round two of discussing this deeply upsetting paper once again authored by our absolute least favorite, the Heritage Foundation. If you missed last week’s episode, go ahead and listen to that before this one because we are continuing right on the same paper right where we left off.

Courtney: And one of the extremely frustrating things about this paper and others like it, we touched on it a little bit in a different context last week, where they’ll sort of pick and choose the sort of science or science-coded language they want that will back up their argument that is fundamentally religious at the end of the day. But they also pick and choose research.

Courtney: And in my opinion, they try to cite research to make it seem like this idea that everything we do in society needs to be put to the goal of creating more natural families, which to them is a married biological mother and a married biological father who procreate the natural way. And one researcher that they go on to cite is Melissa Kearney, who is the author of the book The Two-Parent Privilege. I’m not going to lie to you, I have not read this book, but from the little bit that I do know tangentially about this economist’s work, they take one paragraph out of an entire book and use it to justify their views. This is a trained economist from MIT who talks about the economic and social challenges of children who are raised in one parent homes, essentially.

Courtney: And the title itself, it kind of speaks for itself, right? The two-parent privilege. It is a privilege to grow up with two parents. But from a purely economic standpoint, my understanding is that stable two-parent households do have more resources. There are typically on average more resources to pool and more tax incentives, other bits of economic legislation that heavily incentivize this type of family structure already. Not even counting the new legislation that this paper are proposing. But in my eyes, it’s all about resources. It’s about money, it’s about stability. It’s not the moral argument that the Heritage Foundation is trying to make it. They’re trying to make it a question of morality saying children do better because this is how it’s supposed to be. This is how God wanted it. Anything outside of that is subpar.

Courtney: But when we know that there are over a thousand laws in this country, at the federal level alone, that are purely to the benefit of married couples, many of which are strictly economic. We’ve got tax breaks on estates, inheritance taxes, things of that nature. There are exemptions from IRA penalties that otherwise unmarried people might need to pay. Income tax breaks, which isn’t for every single couple in every single tax bracket, but it’s a good number of them that warrants mentioning in this conversation. So it really does seem to me that there is already an economic problem in the way our laws are designed to incentivize marriage that is to the disadvantage and detriment of single people, including those who have children. And the Heritage Foundation saw it and said, “Yeah, let’s make that problem worse. Let’s make even more economic disadvantages for single people.”

Courtney: Because at the end of the day, we just need more married biological procreating parents. And one of the reasons they justify this is that they allege that the more cis-straight-religious-married-couples intending to have kids that there are the better it is for everybody, even the people who don’t do that. Which is very much what we’ve talked about before when we have talked about previous writings from this organization and others like it. They’ll call out economic problems, and instead of trying to address it as an economic problem, they’ll just be like, “If everyone got married the way God wanted it to be, the world will be peaceful. All the problems will be fixed.” And that’s just not how it works. But they do the same thing here while pretending to cite studies that back them up. But they literally say, “Healthy and vibrant families create substantial positive externalities, meaning spillover benefits for others and everyone benefits.”

Royce: Is this just trickle-down family edition?

Courtney: Yes! Yes, it is. Because then they’re like, you know, in neighborhoods that have a lot of single parent households? More crime, more homicides. What do we do about all this gun violence in the country? More people should get married! That’ll fix it. And even in research where they aren’t wildly slanting and taking out of context, it’s really a matter of asking the wrong question. If they take a data point that says, yeah, children raised in a home where both parents are present tend to do better economically, socially, educationally, I feel – and this might be a hot take here – that maybe the question shouldn’t be how do we get more people to get married? And how do we make it harder for them to divorce once they are married? Maybe the question should be: what’s wrong with our system that we can’t meaningfully support households that look like this?

Courtney: You’re never going to abolish households that look like this. It’s never going to happen, no matter how many roadblocks you put, no matter how many incentives, no matter how many carrots and sticks you throw at the question of marriage, there are just going to be houses that look different from what you want them to, Heritage Foundation. And I just think maybe the question should be: how do we support all households, all children, all families, no matter what they look like? So now that they very incorrectly identified that the solution to all of society’s ills is more marriage and children – but only the right kind of marriage and the right kind of children – they go on to analyze, well, what are some of the cultural and behavioral obstacles to this type of family formation we’re seeking?

Courtney: And of course, one of the obstacles is that people aren’t going to church as much as they used to. If people just went to church more often, maybe they would marry religiously more. And of course they blame liberals for it. Those darn liberals making people less Christian. So they go on to argue that the government discriminated against churches during COVID-19 and so the government needs to actively support religion because that will lead to more– They say, “Affirm God’s design for the human body, sex, marriage, and the family.” So one of their proposals is they support a uniform day of rest. That’s right. We ought to limit commercial activity on our uniform day of rest.

Royce: Is that just Sunday?

Courtney: It’s got to be Sunday. What other day is it going to be? I highly doubt the people writing this paper are like, “Yeah, let’s do Friday.” And they do say, you know, yeah, even the Postal Service doesn’t work on Sunday, a lot of banks are closed on Sundays. “Even the ever-popular Chick-fil-A chain closes its restaurants on Sundays.” That’s right, the Heritage Foundation thinks our government should be more like Chick-fil-A. [sighs] I hate it here. They talk about how higher education should talk more about family building than career building. ’Cause, you know, even graduation speeches all across America talk about finding one’s passion and building a career and maybe even volunteering or seeing the world, but quote, “Rarely are young people told that their schooling, whether high school or college, has prepared them for marriage and family,” so that’s a problem. Let’s get more marriage and family in schools.

Courtney: And then of course, online dating, hookups, and pornography all bad. Gotta go. Throw them all out. Also, we gotta stop talking about climate change. People concerned about climate change don’t have as many kids. Gotta stop talking about it. Stop telling people that climate change is an existential threat to the Earth, because that bums people out and they wonder if they’re bringing kids into a doomed world. Which is another thing that I really loathe, and we’ve talked about this before. Specifically we’ve talked about it when it comes to asexuality. Because anytime some of their warped talking points that are bigoted come out, a knee jerk reaction taken out of context is always like, “They don’t even know what asexuality is.” But when you actually look at what they’re saying, they use our talking points against us.

Courtney: They will say in their papers talking about how asexuality and asexual counselors shouldn’t be allowed around children. They’ll say, well, you know, it’s because asexuality doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t or don’t have sexual activity. And it’s like, no, they listen to our talking points. They know what we’re saying. And they tried to use it against us. Because so often in this pro-natalism conversation, where everyone’s like, “We need more kids, we need more kids, why aren’t people having more kids,” I see a lot of people, especially millennials and Gen Z, saying, “Well, they aren’t correctly identifying the problem. The problem is climate change. The problem is we can’t afford houses.” And they’ll throw out all of these, like, very valid reasons why individual people might choose to not have kids or to put off having kids, as if they don’t hear us and listen to us, but they put it in their papers.

Courtney: They know that climate change is one of the reasons why people cite it. They just come to entirely the wrong conclusions about what to do about these concerns. They say right here, quote, “The climate change alarmism demoralizes young people who believe it.” But then they say, “But here’s the good news: actually, the world is not becoming more hostile to life. It’s actually better than it’s ever been before.” But they cite reasons that are unrelated to our actual concerns. In fact, some of these, if you look at it long enough, are problems in and of themselves. They say, “Resources are more abundant than ever, and it has never been easier to feed the world’s population.” Yeah, we’ve got all of these food systems in place, but we still have such monumental economic inequality that there are still people who can’t access it, even though it is so abundant.

Courtney: In Kansas City alone – Kansas City alone – puts 400,000 tons of food in landfills every year. 400,000 tons! And yet there are people on the streets starving every day. That is not a just system. They’re looking at this like, “Look at how good it is. Look at how much food we have. There’s so much food. There’s enough food to feed everyone,” and yet not everyone is getting fed. And that’s the kind of fucking problem that people like this are not looking to solve. If anything, their policies are going to make it much, much worse. And since I do want to get into the actual family building policies they’re proposing, I’m not going to dwell on this too much, but for anybody who does want to read it, of course, it’s going to be linked in the usual places.

Courtney: And especially anyone who is an advocate for climate change, I do really recommend reading through this entire section, because just like how they listen to our talking points, we really need to be listening to theirs in order to better understand how we can combat these ideologies. Because once you really read what they’re saying, it’s so obvious that we’re all just living on completely different planets. But they’ll allege things, for instance, like, “Well, part of the problem is that climate advocates treat carbon dioxide as a pollutant. And it’s not. If we stop treating carbon dioxide as a pollutant, we can just, you know, remove all of the data points around that.”

Courtney: And this next part just kind of made me giggle because they do these like citing economic studies, they do this scientific language, they do all these social studies. But then: “In the famed book turned movie Eat, Pray, Love, the main character walks away from her marriage.” So now they’re citing fiction! Which is really interesting that they cite Eat, Pray, Love as a bad thing because I haven’t read or watched it. I know nothing about this plot. The only thing I know about this plot is what this paper from the Heritage Foundation has told me about it. But aren’t, like, those little white pillows with, like, black cursive font that say eat, pray, love, just, like, the most cis-straight-married-couple thing you can think of?

Royce: It sounds very basic, yeah, but I know nothing as well, except for the title here.

Courtney: But they really just use that as a jumping off point for talking about divorce-bad. But they talk about things like how in some states, assets get divided 50/50 in the case of a divorce, or they talk about situations where alimony is granted to one spouse after a divorce is finalized. And they see these things as, quote, “Perverse incentives for ending marriage.” Marriages they think could have otherwise been saved. They go on to say, “We must end the penalization of married couples.” Which, again, reading a paper like this as someone who has done the type of research I already have, it’s always so laughable every time they insist that the world is out to get married couple and marriage and religious people. But they say in order to end this penalization, it starts with welfare reform. [reading] “Because marriage is an all-purpose antibody that protects not just men, women and children, but the entire body of society. Marriage greatly reduces poverty, child sexual abuse, suicide rates and drug abuse. It also boosts educational attainment, wages, physical and mental health, and longevity.”

Royce: I don’t know that the past couple decades of people writing about how much they hate their spouses is a good sign that that helps with mental health.

Courtney: Yeah, there’s that. So from here, they refer back to President Lyndon B. Johnson, who in 1964 launched the War on Poverty, “With a desire to strike at the causes, not just the consequences of poverty.” But the Heritage Foundation alleges that it wasn’t just a war on poverty, it was a war on marriage. [reading] “It can be thought of – they say – as a war on wedlock.” Because what welfare does, you see, is: [reading] “moves the primary responsibility of providing for a family from fathers – you know, men – the head of the household, the religious leaders, of a home to the government.” And they say this is in large part because welfare policies are often focused on subsidizing single-parent families. But then they also say welfare benefits are cut sharply when lower-income parents marry.

Courtney: And until you dig further, I almost have to go, oh, are they gonna get there? Are they onto something? Are they really gonna talk about a shared concern that I have? Because there are situations where we fundamentally lack marriage equality because one example we often cite are disability benefits. A lot of disabled folks literally cannot get married without losing their life saving benefits that are often so astronomically expensive that there’s no way that even getting married and combining and pooling resources is going to be able to cover it. So when I hear someone else saying, even if it’s the Heritage Foundation saying, you know, benefits shouldn’t be cut when people get married, I’m on board. I’m actually right there with you.

Courtney: We should stop enforcing mandatory poverty for disabled people who often can’t have more than $2,000 in – not even just cash, but assets – total, or else they’ll lose benefits. Often getting married is just inherently gonna wipe that out. Forget about buying a house. Even if you’ve got no money in the bank, a house alone, more than $2,000. But whereas that’s where my brain is going, let’s find out where their brain is going. So in their synopsis they claim that the welfare state operates like the income tax would if it lacked the category of married filing jointly. And they say that by very nature of welfare existing, there are now financial incentives not to marry. The example they use is a single mother with two children who earns $20,000 a year, which is certainly not enough to raise two young children.

Courtney: But then they say if the father has his own annual earnings of $30,000, why would these two ever get married? Because she can qualify for welfare with $20,000 and two children to share. But if they got married, their combined household income would be $50,000 and she’d lose her welfare. And there are just way too many actual social nuances to reduce this to math. If there’s a single mother with two children who is not married to the children’s father, we don’t even know if it’s one father of both of them or two different fathers. They– I think this example assumes that it’s the same guy for both kids. But there’s a whole other complex layer to this where $50,000 for four people, even if these two love each other, even if they want to get married, where are they living? Depending on what area of the country, $50,000 for four people can still be very, very tight.

Royce: That’s definitely below the national average, right? I feel like that was below the national average like 20 years ago.

Courtney: For a four person family, it is well below the median. And like averages and medians aside, what is an actual living wage? Here from the NASDAQ from just a few months ago, if you’re raising a family of four in 2025, you’ll need a six figure income in 26 states. Well, while we’re doing math here, I think that’s more than half of them. So immediately their example here is saying, “Yeah, we should take away this welfare because, in this example, we want these two people to get married.” And when they do get married, they will be making less than half of what you need for a living wage to raise this family in over half of the states in our country. So I’m kind of thinking maybe that family should get a little extra financial assistance whether they’re married or not.

Courtney: Actually, this– I’m going to link this NASDAQ article also because West Virginia is cited as the state with the lowest living wage required to support a family of four. And they’re coming in at $82,338. And yet they talk about what this couple has, if unmarried, the combined post tax resources of the mother and father, including the welfare that the mother was receiving, would be $81,279. That’s still less than what you need for a family of four in the state with the lowest living wage! So continuing on with their spiel about welfare. Remember when earlier I asked if they know how evil they sound with a lot of the things that they say?

Royce: Yeah.

Courtney: They do admit here– Because amidst all these figures, which we now know are still not living wages for anybody in this country, they say that the only way to reform welfare in their favor is if it is with three goals. One, strengthen and encourage marriage. That should be the number one goal of welfare. Number two: Strengthen work requirements and provide more targeted and efficient work incentives. That’s very familiar conservative rhetoric. We’ve heard that one before. And then alter welfare programs to provide more accurate information on spending that the public can easily grasp. That one’s not as interesting for our conversational purposes today. But they do say these themes all complement each other. And admit, [reading] “For instance, imposing work requirements on a single parent might seem callous, but they’re not.”

Courtney: They’re just not. We need stricter work requirements, specifically, especially for single parents. Which is really, really fascinating because I sort of brushed over it, but earlier in this report, they spend a good chunk of time talking about how important it is for especially babies to have a lot of quality care with their married biological parents, and how outsourcing childcare is just not the same, it’s just not as good. And they even give a nod as to how expensive childcare is. So they will say and admit that in the same report where they’re saying, “Okay, but if you have a single parent, they gotta work more. Gotta work more hours, gotta make more money.” Which paired with everything else they’re advocating for is almost certainly not actually going to be enough money to afford whatever childcare is necessary. They say it may seem callous, but trust us, it’s fine.

Courtney: Oh, and backing up just a half a second because I definitely wanted to talk about this when they were talking about colleges and campus culture, they say a few different things. And it comes up later in the report, so we’re gonna circle back to this also, but they simultaneously say fewer people should go to college in general, but also the people who do go to college should just be more focusing on using college to find your future spouse. And then they don’t even say ‘future’. They’re like, why not current spouse? They cite, as a positive thing that conservative and religious colleges have is a culture that they call ring by spring. And they think that every other college in the country should follow suit and do everything they can to incentivize this kind of culture.

Courtney: Ideas for how to do this: [reading] “Schools can cultivate a local marriage culture by using faculty and graduate students in the appropriate disciplines to offer premarital education and counseling services to couples in their surrounding communities. Another idea involves allowing campus grounds and facilities to be used for weddings with deep discounts for couples that give schools permission to use their wedding photos for on-campus marriage marketing campaigns.” They also want student groups to host events about relationships where they bring in married couples like alumni who met on campus. And a couple of these I don’t think are inherently bad.

Courtney: Like, they shouldn’t be going out of their way to be like, “Hey, young adults who are trying to pursue education, you should maybe be thinking more about marriage.” But they do say like, another provision could be like housing for married students to be able to live together. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I think that’s fine. Having a variety of housing options. That’s okay. Nursing stations also kind of confuses me, like don’t– Aren’t there already nurses on college campuses? Is that not a thing campuses already have? And then they mention nursing stations, which isn’t that something that colleges already have? Like maybe not all of them, but I have to imagine a growing number of them. I’ve seen more employers adding nursing stations.

Royce: I mean, that would make sense. I guess I can’t really comment on it. My college was abnormal.

Courtney: Yeah, what did you have in your college in lieu of marital marketing campaigns? What did they incentivize you to do on your campus?

Royce: I don’t know. There was like a quarterly LAN party. [Courtney laughs] There was a LARP once a year.

Courtney: So like those couple of things, housing for married students, fine. Nursing stations, great. Don’t have any issues with those. But then they gotta put in special parking spaces for expecting students. And this is a thing that I, even before reading this paper, wanted to mention on this podcast because it’s just so frustrating. But this is a big conservative push right now that’s been going on for at least several months now. Where conservatives want to basically allow any and all pregnant women to park in disabled parking spaces. And it’s a growing push. There have been lawmakers calling for this. It is, like, certainly a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act, but that didn’t stop Florida lawmakers from actually allowing pregnant women to get a one year accessible parking permit.

Courtney: Now, bear in mind, pregnancy can be disabling for some people. There are pregnancy complications. There are hidden disabilities or underlying medical conditions that might be unearthed or exacerbated by the changes a body goes through during pregnancy. So for those people for whom pregnancy is disabling, even if it’s temporarily disabling, absolutely. Give them disabled parking spaces. They have exactly the same channel as every other disabled person in this country to access those. But there is no requirement for businesses to add additional parking spaces, but now there’s going to be a tremendous number of new people using them. And here I have a quote.

Courtney: This is from the Washington Post, Patrick T. Brown, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center – which is another one of these conservative think tanks, and remember, they all talk, they share talking points pretty regularly – explicitly said that the reason for this is that it’s a low cost, pro-family policy. And that’s what this entire paper is talking about, pro-family policies, not pronatalist policies. And he says, quote, “It’s a high visibility way of saying we are serious about our commitments to family and moms and babies.” That’s it. It’s all optics. We just want to show people that if you are pregnant, you’re more important. He says he got the idea after going for lunch with his wife and their four children. And it was a hot summer day, and at first only the disabled spots up front were open, and his wife half-jokingly asked him to write about a world where new moms could use those spaces.

Courtney: And he said, “Yup, you know what? Good idea, honey. I’ll do exactly that.” The fact that, like– This is the insulting part, the fact that that is the origin of it and he tells us that as if it’s just a cute, quirky little anecdote that is not enraging. Like, you know, it was hot out and we just wanted to park closer. So now I’m advocating that people actually write laws to let us do that, as if that’s not an abuse of power. And in writing and discussing this bill in Florida, a representative named Fiona McFarland was like, “Yeah, I remember one time when I was pregnant and it was hot outside, I sweat and waddled across the parking lot. So yeah, sure, I would also like to park up front, please.” And a colleague of hers was concerned that by passing this law, it would imply that pregnant women are inherently disabled because they’re using the disabled parking places. And Fiona responded with, “I feel very strongly that pregnancy is not a disability. I just want to be able to park up front.”

Courtney: Literally just said that. Just said that in a whole room of people. So that’s another reason why I always say anytime we dig into organizations like this, if you have actually read their work before, go ahead and fill out a bingo card. You see the same things come up over and over again, sometimes more overtly than others, but they sneak these little things in here. And in this case it’s just like, yeah, college campuses should give special parking to pregnant students. That’ll help. So for all of their out-of-touch-ness when it comes to livable wages, they do say a couple of times that, you know, the cost of living is very high, but their answers to those things leave a bit to be desired. They say that excessive government intervention, such as regulations, taxes, and subsidies, stunt innovation and make Americans poorer.

Royce: Which is categorically false.

Courtney: Yeah. So they’re like, you know how it’s so hard to buy homes right now? And home ownership is out of reach for so many people? Couple of ideas for that. What if we take government sponsored lending options like Fannie Mae and why don’t we just go ahead and privatize all of those? Also, let’s remove all permitting requirements from the Environmental Protection Agency when building houses.

Royce: Bringing back asbestos and lead paint, just like in the good old days.

Courtney: Just like in the good old days! Back when houses were affordable. Make America healthy again. Every now and then they make, like, a couple of tiny little good points, but they’re all, like, very tangential to the larger policy decisions they’re making. Like they actually, shockingly, I’m sure also to the detriment of certain billionaires, they admit that, you know, flexibility and being able to like work from home is actually maybe pretty good. Maybe that’s a good thing for parents. Also, maybe people should have quality broadband access. That’s good for families. But one thing I don’t like amidst that conversation of, you know, flexible options work from home options, they’re like a little too jazzed about gig work. They’re like, gig work is great for Americans. Less stress, better health, higher incomes. Not always.

Royce: Hardly ever.

Courtney: Hardly ever. But, you know what gig work doesn’t have? Things like health insurance. Which I– Health insurance should not be so heavily tied to employment in this country anyway, but I am pretty sure later on in this exact paper they blame Obamacare subsidies for disincentivizing work. Which I beg them, I beg them to produce a single American who’s like, you know, “Healthcare was too expensive before I qualified for these Obamacare subsidies, but now that I have these subsidies, I just don’t need to work anymore because it’s so cheap.” Never! Never has that happened.

Courtney: They do go on after home-ownership to talk more, and once again, about higher education. And their biggest concern time and time again is more education means later marriage means fewer children, therefore more education bad. So they definitely have, like, a war on education, you may say, but they have a couple of accidental good points in here. There’s like one or two things in here that we should maybe hear them out. They refer to it as over-credentialism for attaining degrees for jobs that maybe don’t necessarily require them. And some of the things they implore are like requiring a bachelor’s degree should not be a requirement for as many jobs as it currently is. I think there’s certainly a nugget of truth in that.

Royce: Yeah, that makes sense.

Courtney: And so they advocate that there also be more options for more fields where you can get on-the-job training. I think if done right, that’s totally fine. And they make something that is honestly such a good point that I am shocked because I know religious conservative people who feel the exact opposite about this specific issue. They want to– they advocate for reviewing and eliminating needless occupational licensure laws so that people can pursue jobs like, they mention, bartending, they mention arranging flowers, and braiding hair. I about fell out of my chair! Because I know situations where specifically as a means to target African hair braiders, there are states who have required people who just braiding hair in accordance with their culture, with their afro-textured hair, they’ll require them to get a full cosmetology license.

Courtney: Regardless of the fact that they don’t use harsh chemicals, aren’t even cutting the hair, and a lot of cosmetology schools don’t actually provide adequate education for afro-textured hair in the first place. So that has like really screwed with a lot of people’s businesses in the past where this has been their means of making money is braiding hair. And then a law changes and all of a sudden they legally cannot do that without paying and attending cosmetology school and learning things that don’t actually apply to them. And so– And I’ve been furious about this for so long. And so to see this, in a paper by the Heritage Foundation…? Where is that meme about the worst guy you know?

Royce: It does make sense for them to have come to that conclusion alongside gig work and the lessening of credentials or of higher education in general, though. Like, it’s along the same train of thought.

Courtney: Which is fascinating though, because it’s people like them who put a lot of these barriers in the first place.

Royce: Yeah, but now it’s preventing their people from getting jobs.

Courtney: But, you know, they can’t have any good point that is just solely a good point in and of itself. Because it has to go alongside, like, sure, are there some jobs that do not need a degree or a certificate or a license that we could ease up on a bit? Sure, absolutely. But they’re like, oh, we do have to take it a step further, though. Part of the reason why more people have been able to go to school is that there’s more options, there’s more loan programs. And since they want fewer people to go to college, and the people who do go to college they want them to stay in college for less time, let’s go ahead and eliminate the PLUS loan program. Just fully eliminate it. They say that’ll save taxpayers $34 billion over a 10-year period of time, so hey, that’s good.

Courtney: But that’s like such an enormous loan program for grad students. And there actually are some professions that do require grad school. That is gonna be a requirement for some professions. And maybe it would be good if people could still access loans to be able to go to those programs. I don’t know, that’s just me. I think education should be like kids. We should let people have as much or as little higher education as they want.

Courtney: So now that they’ve made all of their ideas clear for their vision of college, they start to talk about technology and how technology policy should be pro-family, not merely pro-natal. And so of course they start this conversation with the question of surrogacy.

Courtney: But they argue: [Reading] “Just because a commercial surrogacy contract may end in the birth of a child, however, does not mean that it is just or good for families and society. Surrogacy, whether achieved through artificial means or not, always intentionally deprives a child of the birth mother who carries and nurtures the child for nine months and who ultimately bears the child. Furthermore – get your bingo cards ready – surrogacy severs the procreative act from the unitive act.” They really, really think like this. They’re like, why this baby was not created via sexual intercourse? Throw it away. Bring me a child conceived the old-fashioned way. They say, and this is a direct quote, [reading] “It also dissolves the organic unity of marriage, sex, pregnancy, and childbirth.”

Courtney: And that is not even the only time in this paper where they say the unity of marriage, sex, and childbirth. Disgusting. But then, of course, they ask the question about what about IVF? After all, medical infertility is a thing for a variety of reasons for many Americans. And they kind of argue, and this is an odd one because, you know, Trump called himself the Fertilization President and made all these promises pertaining to IVF. So even though they’re kind of fighting with the pronatalists and Elon Musk, they don’t really want to step on any toes too hard where it comes to Trump himself. They do, of course, mention the problem of the destruction of millions of unwanted human embryos. More anti-abortion propaganda, of course.

Courtney: So here’s another tactic that they sprinkle throughout here. They use a lot of, like, language that sounds very critical of capitalism, which is very interesting. Like, they start talking about the excessive profits in the multi-billion dollar Big Fertility industry. And earlier, when they were talking about other economic policies pertaining to housing, along with “We shouldn’t let the, you know, EPA dictate anything when we’re building houses,” they also said that we should “end crony capitalism subsidies for green energy”. So seeing just like little sprinkles of that language in here is whiplash inducing. But without going too terribly hard on like, “We should outright ban IVF,” which they have made that argument before, they try to redirect saying, you know, instead of trying to find a way around infertility, we should just focus all of our resources on finding the root cause of infertility.

Courtney: So this is something I’m going to need to read more about, because I imagine it’s going to start to pop up in these types of conversations more often, and I truthfully don’t know much about it at this point in time, but they point to RRM, restorative reproductive medicine.

Courtney: So now that they have all of these ideas that they want to work toward, how are they gonna do it? Well, the same way they always try to do everything it seems with the Heritage Foundation: set our goal, laser focus on it, throw out everything that isn’t going towards our goal, and use every single possible branch and agency in the government at our disposal to try to reach our goals at all cost. They cite, for instance, the Civil Rights Act of 1964. You know, good ol’ Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin.

Courtney: In any program that is receiving any federal funding, they argue, let’s do that, but with pro-family legislation. They want the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs to create a Standardized Family Impact Appendix to every major governmental rule. And to identify any and all channels that may plausibly affect marriage stability and childbearing. But they also want the Office of Management and Budget, the OMB, alongside the Department of Justice, to jointly issue uniform guidance for family impact assessment in federally assisted programs. Which would require any program receiving federal aid to publicly report how eligibility definitions, co-pay schedules, or cost-sharing rules affect two-parent households or transitions from cohabitation to marriage.

Courtney: The key reform would be to make family policy goals and considerations explicit conditions of grant recipients and enforce enforceable by Justice Department enforcement actions. And they call this the whole of government approach. Every single bit of funding, every single branch, every single agency, this is your goal. You have to work towards this end in whatever sector you work in. Including the Department of Transportation, who apparently actually did last year in 2025 issue a policy memo directing the Department of Transportation to prioritize communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average. So I guess, sorry states that aren’t– I don’t know all the states that have higher than average, but I know, like, South Dakota has like the highest fertility rate and it’s followed shortly by, like, North Dakota. So sorry everyone who isn’t Upper Midwest. You don’t get any federal transportation grants, loans, or contracts. No roads for you!

Courtney: So that’s apparently a thing that has already happened. But what do they want from the Department of Health and Human Services, I wonder? They want to create marriage bootcamps. Just anybody who is a cohabitating couple who have children, let’s put them in a marriage bootcamp. Let’s get federal funding to local churches to run programs that cover things like communication, money management, blended families, fidelity and conflict resolution. And people who take the marriage bootcamp and then get married: $5,000 wedding bonus on your wedding day. Let’s just pay people to get married. Let’s just hand them cash. Let’s funnel the federal dollars through a local church and then just hand them cash.

Courtney: And what about the Department of Education? They’re like, “Well, the good thing is we’re destroying the Department of Education actively, right now. That’s a thing we’re working on. We told you we would, and we are.” But while it’s still around, before we totally destroy it– That’s another thing, put it on your bingo card. That’s another thing they do. Abolish this agency. But before we do weaponize this agency to do what we want it to do and then banish it. [reading] “Use the Department of Education to teach young people that graduating from high school, getting married, and having children in that order is a near guarantee of life success.” Use the Department of Education to teach children that and then throw away the whole department. We’re done here. That’s all we needed it for. Pack it up!

Courtney: And then they talk about the scientific research policy. The National Science Foundation already explicitly expects projects to have – quote – “the potential to benefit society and contribute to the achievement of specific desired societal outcomes.” So they say, well, our specific desired societal outcome is more marriage, so under this policy, researchers will need to be as concrete as possible in defining measurable outcomes on marriage and family. Oh, and remember when I said earlier that there are over a thousand legal benefits of marriage in this country? They actually call attention to that, which is wild because they’re talking about all of these marriage penalties that need to be banned. But they straight up cite the Government Accountability Office that states there are 1,138 federal statutory provisions in which marital status is a factor in determining or receiving benefits, rights, and privileges.

Courtney: And they basically use that to say like, “See, look, America’s already incentivizing marriage. We’re already doing it, let’s just do it harder!” They spend a couple pages talking about how great Israel is. Gotta throw that in there because Israel is, as they say, an outlier among developed nations when it comes to fertility and marriage rates. They state Israel’s total fertility rate is at 2.9, so above replacement rate, which is in this day and age unusual. And of course they chalk it up to widespread religiosity. They’re like, that’s a big factor. So immediately after using Israel as a positive example, that should be aspired to from a religious standpoint, they then use Hungary as a positive example from a policy standpoint, talking about marriage incentives. And the case of Hungary and how their marriage and fertility rates have gone up after enacting policy.

Courtney: And this is not the first time that people from the Heritage Foundation have been praising Hungary, but for those of you who haven’t been paying attention to the situation over there, famous for having a democracy that dissolved into authoritarianism, much like what we’re seeing in our country right now too. And while a lot of us look at that in fear and horror, and as a cautionary tale, the Heritage Foundation is like, “Yeah, more of that. Yes, that is exactly what we wanted, actually.” So this next policy they propose– You know, when I looked at the whole marriage penalty in the welfare system, I was thinking about disability rights and healthcare and mandated poverty for marginalized populations as a problem that, yeah, we should actually solve that. But no, the way they take it, actually, how about instead of providing welfare to single parents or parents who are out of work, let’s just not. Because, you know, it’s really unfair to married couples, so how about nobody gets them?

Courtney: And instead, let’s just add a bunch of tax credits geared towards families with married parents. So the tax credits they propose, calling it the Family and Marriage Tax Credit, or FAM for short. What is the FAM? Well, currently there is an adoption tax credit. The per child maximum tax credit in most states is $17,670. And without looking up the exact origins, I imagine that’s just because there are lots of kids in this country who do want or need to be adopted. And someone along the line said, hey, we should make it financially easier for people to adopt children. These guys think, well, that’s not fair to people who are having biological children, because we know biological parents and biological children are the best home. Those are the homes we want to incentivize. So the FAM credit is $4,418 refundable tax credit for married joint filers who have a child and where both the filing adults claiming the credit are the biological parent of the child in question.

Courtney: So you have to be married and both have to be the biological parent of that child in order to get this tax credit. Which you can then claim for the first four years. Then in addition to that, bump that up 25% large family bonus for any filers having their third or more child and build into the tax code that this credit is going to be inflation adjusted every year. But there’s going to be a phase-in requirement for this, not only do both parents need to be married and they both need to be the biological parent of the child. They don’t get to claim this tax credit until they have at least $30,500 of earned income. And even at $30,500, that phase-in sort of starting rate is only going to be 16% of the credit, and it doesn’t get fully phased in for the whole credit unless the family has $57,500 in income.

Courtney: And they’re like, this is good, because it incentivizes work, and it incentivizes marriage. What’s the actual annual minimum wage for the full year? I have to look this up now. I only know it bi-hourly, off the top of my head. So yeah, that’s what I thought. Uh, the annual wage in this country, if you have the minimum $7.25 per hour, as mandated by our federal government, a 40-hour workweek that equates to $15,080. Even in states that have enacted a $15 an hour minimum wage, that’s only $31,200 a year. So even that just barely scrapes by the first small phase-in that you can get. Even the $57,500. Even their example couple from earlier can’t get that, that they wanted so badly to get married, because one of them was making $30,000 and the other was making $20,000, and they had two kids, family of four. They don’t even get the full tax credit, and you’re taking away all of their other welfare.

Courtney: But hey, if they want to go to college to increase their prospects for maybe higher paying jobs, too bad, there are fewer loan options now. And they even say one of the reasons why this is good is that it encourages marriage. But it’s also good because it favors large families, but only with married parents. It says that. They’re not even trying to hide it. Marriage is the point. It’s the point of all of this. So their next policy proposal is the Home Childcare Equalization Credit. HCE. Because of course they know childcare is expensive. But when it comes to childcare support, Congress nowadays has, quote, “made a deliberate choice to privilege and subsidize out of home, marriage agnostic, non-parental childcare, while not including or privileging at home, married, parent provided childcare and child raising.” So they, of course, again, want to get rid of things like Head Start. We’ve heard that before. It was in Project 2025, too.

Courtney: So this HCE credit, which is available only to married couple families that are already eligible for the FAM credit. So again, earlier they were dogging on the fact that people who need welfare need to go to all these different other agencies. They’re like, oh, well, there’s food stamps, and there’s housing subsidies, and there’s this, that, and the other thing, and they’re like, “This is wasteful! We shouldn’t have all of these different things! Because they qualify for all of them, even though they still can’t make ends meet when they have them all.” But they’re doing exactly the same thing here, just to the people they wanted to go to. Hey, if you’re already getting a big tax credit, let’s also give you more.

Courtney: In this case, $2,000 for each eligible child under age five. And this is the same kind of logic as, like, education vouchers that we’ve heard before, like, but what about people who want to homeschool their kids or send them to religious schools? They should get money. So they specifically say, hey, this is a great way to do this because now you have options like faith-based providers, or you can just keep the money and do the childcare yourself.

Courtney: And then this final one is possibly my least favorite. It’s really hard to quantify. They’re all terrible. But they want to create a newlywed early starters trust or nest accounts. Whereupon the birth of a child – and they gotta sneak this in, where at least one of the parents is a U.S. citizen – the federal government will seed an account with $2,500. That in and of itself, not too bad. I’m in favor of giving new humans money. Let’s do it. Sounds great.

Courtney: But these accounts need to, like all other government policies, incentivize marriage. And this will be a special kind of investment account where parents could continue to contribute money to it throughout childhood. Fine, don’t have any issues with that. However, withdrawals would not be allowed from these nest accounts until the beneficiary either marries or turns 30 years of age. Once beneficiaries turn 30 years of age, they may withdraw any or all funds from the nest account, however, any withdrawals after turning 30 will be taxed. But if you get married, you can start withdrawing money from that account tax-free. Literally the government taking money away from you if you do not get married before age 30. But it has to be even earlier than that though, because you can withdraw 33% of the balance per year, so it takes you at least three years to withdraw all the money. So they point out that you need to marry no later than age 27 in order to get all of your money tax free.

Royce: Well, if that ever gets implemented and somehow miraculously doesn’t get legally overturned by the time the first generation of holders reaches 27, I feel like the tax benefits, the tax savings, would end up being more money than the cost of a divorce. So there would be a very easy trend of just, like, find online matchmaking, how to do this thing, marry, make your withdrawals, divorce.

Courtney: But if they have it their way, no no-fault divorce. Maybe no divorce, period. But yeah, like for all this talk and concern about sham marriages, either pertaining to immigration or platonic marriage or any number of other things, like I would really hate to see the culture of, like, trying to legally challenge sham marriages once they enact– Or like if they theoretically enacted absolutely everything they’re talking about here, there would– There would absolutely be more marriages of convenience. And honestly, I think that would be any individual couple’s right.

Royce: Yeah, the financial incentives encourage them.

Courtney: So that is it. We did it. We got all the way through this brand spanking new Heritage report. Links to read that, as well as any other resources we cited in this episode, in the show notes on our website, as well as the description box on YouTube. And I know that every time I dig into the shenanigans of the Heritage Foundation or any such similar conservative religious think tank, I need to unwind, I need to relax. And one of my many relaxing hobbies is crochet. If you too like to relax with a little fiber arts, then it is my absolute joy and delight to introduce you to today’s featured MarketplACE vendor: Vannchet. Where you can find crochet patterns made by a Latino/aroace/non-binary member of our community, links to find their shop in all the same usual places. And there are some really cute options here.

Courtney: I got a pattern myself because I’ve been doing a lot of amigurumi, and my latest project has been trying to figure out how to make a standing doll, a standing base figure, and this shop actually has patterns for that. This is great if you want to design your own character or there are some pre-existing characters here. There are a lot of really cute Pokémon. There’s a Bulbasaur, Charmander, Squirtle. We’ve got an Eevee. And if that’s not your preferred IP, there are patterns for cherry blossom earrings, an adorable little froggy ball, little cat owl, just lots of different cute little animals here. And all of these patterns are available in English as well as Spanish. So if you already love crochet or if you’re looking to learn, definitely check out today’s MarketplACE vendor. Since we got all the way through this paper, I don’t know what next week’s episode is gonna be yet. Hopefully it’ll be a much more fun topic, but honestly, no promises. As always, thank you all so much for being here, and we will talk to you next time.