Opinion: Republicans want to repeal the modern family

From the leaders of Project 2025 and JD Vance all the way down to state lawmakers, a growing number of far-right Republicans are attacking child care programs, want to make it harder for women to get divorced, and want to pass laws that penalize single parents. 

In November 1977, activists arrived in Houston for a rally organized by conservative leaders and cultural dissidents. The event featured patriotic music, marching, and speeches from right-wing figures like Phyllis Schlafly, the anti-feminist firebrand who led the fight to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment. 

The gathering culminated with declarations of defiance: more than 15,000 attendees — whose resentments and paranoias were stoked by distortions and lies — voted to condemn abortion, gay rights, and ratification of the ERA, which would have guaranteed equal rights to all Americans, regardless of gender.

The event ran simultaneously with and in protest of the National Women’s Conference, positioning conservatives as the guardians of the traditional values and gender roles that organizers claimed were under attack by the feminist assembly across town. They were hardly subtle in their branding: The Pro-Family Rally was officially organized and hosted by the National Pro-Family Forum, which was aligned with Focus on the Family, a puritanical new organization launched by fundamentalist preacher James Dobson earlier that year. Dobson’s group has been a leading force in the anti-LGBTQ movement and efforts to impose conservative Christian norms on schools, reproductive rights, and government for the past five decades.

The religious right and Republican Party more broadly have positioned themselves as sworn defenders of the American family ever since, warping the political definition of the term into a culture war dog whistle. In reality, even much of the GOP’s renewed “pro-family” agenda, touted by lawmakers like Donald Trump’s running mate and Ohio Sen. JD Vance, is trained on fracturing the modern American family.

The right-wing plot to erase and breakup families

Conservatives have a narrow conception of family, which is outlined in Project 2025, the moral and intellectual guidebook of the next Republican government: “Married men and women are the ideal natural family structure because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them.” 

Project 2025 also declares that “families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society.”

It’s rare for such clinical-sounding sentences to be so loaded, but these extend a middle finger to a wide array of people and types of families, including single-parent households, families that foster and adopt children, and multi-generational households. The message is especially brutal to LGBTQ+ people, whose basic existence has become increasingly upsetting to idealogues and policymakers on the right. 

According to a new report out of UCLA, there are 2.6 million LGBTQ+ parents currently raising kids under the age of 18. They’re far more likely to adopt children and take in foster kids, which is easier to do when you’re part of a married couple. The Repubilican platform released in July finally cut out the party’s long-standing opposition to same-sex marriage, but American voters’ support for it has declined precipitously over the past few years, largely driven by a decline of support among Republican voters. 

That decline has, unsurprisingly, coincided with Republican media figures and lawmakers’ increased vilification and efforts to ostracize the LGBTQ+ community. 

Legal experts and advocates have also raised the red flag over indications that the conservative supermajority on the US Supreme Court is laying the groundwork to eventually — and perhaps sooner than later — overturn Obergefell v Hodges, the 2015 decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. Red state lawmakers are busy working hard to erase LGBTQ+ families in the classroom with book bans and laws that prohibit discussion of same-sex spouses in places like Florida, Arkansas, Alabama, Texas, and beyond. 

Texas took it even further, as state Attorney General Ken Paxton sought to forcibly take minors receiving gender-affirming care away from their parents. A court eventually stepped in and blocked that policy, but that’s no credit to the people who pursued it.

The desire to keep abused women submissive to their husbands

As dedicated as they are to destroying same-sex families and those with LGBTQ+ members, many Republicans are equally devoted to preserving “traditional” marriages, no matter how miserable and toxic they become.

Nobody would argue that divorce and custody arrangements are the ideal outcome at the outset of a marriage, but the ability to leave a spouse has been proven key to reducing domestic violence (by up to 30%), improving the mental health of those involved in failed marriages, and even increasing investment in children’s education. 

Republicans have shown no interest in interrogating or understanding the many social and economic factors that have kept the divorce rate at around 40% for several decades and led to a marked shift in the structure of the average American family. In recent years, conservatives have instead taken to bitterly criticizing divorce, demonizing alternative families, and seeking ways to impose their values on a public that has consciously pursued new paths to personal and familial fulfillment. 

Vance, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, and other religious conservatives have instead mused about punitive measures. Near the top of the list has been repealing no-fault divorce laws, which relieve people filing for divorce of the obligation to prove to a judge that their spouse wronged them. It was California Gov. Ronald Reagan of all people who signed the first no-fault divorce law, curtailing the frequently nasty and expensive legal proceedings that often trapped people — women in particular — in abusive, unhappy marriages for years beyond their expiration dates. 

Speaking at a Los Angeles Catholic high school in 2021, Vance rued this emancipation and suggested that women ought to remain in physically abusive marriages for the sake of their children — and perhaps even themselves. Johnson in 2016 blamed no-fault divorce for “the undermining of the foundations of religion and morality,” and has long advocated for religious “covenant marriages,” the dissolution of which must be preceded by marital counseling and two years of separation. 

DeSantis has gone the furthest, signing a bill in 2023 that ended “permanent alimony,” allowing judges to cut off the economic support that is particularly important to women who left the professional world to raise children during their marriages. 

Listening to their collective panic, it would seem that they were unaware that divorcees often find new partners and often remarry, creating the kind of blended families that led to five Trump children from three separate mothers. Today, more than 21% of married opposite-sex couples have at least one child from a previous partner, and at least a quarter of all unmarried couples have a kid from another partner. 

There are more than 11.5 million stepchildren in the United States and 30 million stepparents, a vital role that Republicans like Vance and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene have repeatedly denigrated.

Empty populist posturing

Over the past few years, especially since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, some members of the GOP have sought to present themselves as more interested in supporting families through subsidies and other state financial assistance. This new breed of so-called “New Right” legislators, including Vance and fellow Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), have gone so far as to walk picket lines with working families. 

But when it comes time to vote for policies that help them, they’ve largely been absent, while dutifully showing up to pass laws and confirm judges that put families in the crosshairs. 

Vance has also mocked the idea of universal childcare, calling it “class war on normal people.” which puts him in league with what Schlafly and her ilk were preaching five decades ago, as well as Project 2025, which attacks early childhood education, claiming that children in daycare “experience higher rates of anxiety, depression, and neglect” and instead calls for home-based childcare — something only possible in a household where one parent does not work full-time. It also calls for eliminating the Head Start child care program, which provides access to free child care for many families nationwide.

The GOP also blocked a small expansion of the Child Tax Credit this month and — Vance didn’t even vote. 

This happens over and over, at both the national and state levels. 

Last year in Wisconsin, Republicans stripped Gov. Tony Evers’ paid family leave program out of the state budget. In Michigan, they were powerless to stop the program from slipping through to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s desk, but they released a withering statement that called the idea “summer break for adults.” Only six Republicans in the US Senate backed a federal bill to establish paid leave in late 2022, denying tens of millions of Americans the opportunity to bond with their newborn child or take care of loved ones.

Even the rare pro-family government policies they do support are geared almost entirely toward their idea of what constitutes a family. 

In 2021, Hawley introduced what he called a Parent Tax Credit, a riff on the expanded Child Tax Credit passed by Democrats — with zero GOP support — earlier that year. Whereas the Democrats’ credit provided families with stimulus checks for every child, Hawley’s bill called for checks to be sent to each parent, so that married couples received double the benefit given to a single parent. Hawley noted that the largesse was intended to encourage one parent in a married couple — and it’s not hard to guess which gender he was targeting — to give up their job and stay at home instead. 

The flip side was that Hawley’s proposal would have also effectively penalized the 18 million children living with single parents, who are statistically far more likely to live in poverty. It wouldn’t have even provided unmarried, cohabitating parents with the larger sum, which was explicitly labeled a “marriage bonus.”

Hawley’s tax credit was proselytizing dressed up as populism, and while it went nowhere during a Democratic trifecta, the bill sent a clear message: conservatives care far more about prizing one-size-fits-all traditional family structures than actually finding ways to help all families flourish.

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