Holy Family Inc. – How the Heritage Manifesto Beams the 21st Century Back Into the 19th

Welcome to America, where Sunday is about to become holier than the Constitution, Tinder is treated as a security risk, and the state is no longer neutral but an official relationship therapist. The Heritage Foundation – known as a creative panic center for everything that does not smell like 1950 – has published its new family manifesto. It reads like the script of a Netflix dystopia, just without irony, but with “marriage boot camp” and hostility toward artificial insemination instead. Satan, be gone.

“One might think, ‘A baby is not a political accessory.’ Yet for the authors of the report, that is precisely the task of the next administration: to defend the mother-father-child complex with the brutality of a camouflaged warfare command. Roger Severino, the initiative’s chief ideologue and presumably a secret reader of wedding guides with leather covers, calls for a kind of exorcism against modernity. Everything conceived, loved, or lived outside the heteronormative marriage bed is to be blocked, taxed, or despised by the state. A day of rest, please. And for everyone. ‘Universal Day of Rest,’ they write. It sounds like a rehabilitation program for overworked angels, but it is actually the idea of officially turning Sunday into a state-mandated day of lying down - building on the so-called ‘Blue Laws,’ those regulations that once banned alcohol and fun on the seventh day. So now no more Tinder, no dates, no Netflix sin - instead Bible, bread, and boot camp.”

Anyone living together is to be sent to “marriage boot camp.” Marry or die. The idea behind it: cooking, cleaning, praying – but as a couple and preferably with a ring. Online dating, on the other hand? Devil’s work. Because according to Heritage, digital matchmaking leads to fewer marriages. One could also say: it leads to more choice, fewer toxic relationships, and a degree of self-determination. But that would probably be too much reality for Team Nostalgia. Meanwhile, the president does what he does best: it looks like governance, but it is only an imitation of meaning – made for those who no longer notice the difference. He praises himself for lower IVF costs (IVF stands for in vitro fertilization, meaning artificial fertilization outside the body) while at the same time letting his intellectual trailblazers explain that children are only morally acceptable if they are created in a pious altar-marriage setting. Even frozen embryos are now back on the agenda, since Alabama decided that an ice cube can also be a citizen – as long as it is raised Christian. Trump as the family father of the nation.

ax gifts only for ring bearers. Heritage wants the state to treat childless singles and single parents as the economic scapegoats of the nation going forward. Anyone who does not reproduce as desired or loves in the wrong constellation should pay. Tax policy must “promote marriage, not punish,” the report says. Which implicitly means: punishment for everyone else. And equality? A concept of yesterday. Eric Rosswood, an American author, LGBTQ activist, and father of two children with his husband, sums it up politely: “I don’t believe that love and care are bound to gender or genetics.” For Heritage, however, it is clear: biological parents in holy marriage are the ideal, everything else is deviation in need of therapy.

The state as moral gardener. “The government should remove the weeds,” the report says. What is meant are not drugs, but political programs that make life easier for patchwork families, single parents, or queer people. Because these “poison the soil,” according to the original wording. Anyone who thought government was there for everyone – wrong. Now it is back to morality lessons with a federal eagle logo. Heritage has transformed in recent years from a think tank into a feel tank – full of reactionary longings, moral condescension, and political wish fantasies. They call it “family policy.” One could also simply call it: an ideological core renovation of society, packaged as a feel-good offensive.

Anyone wondering whether this is a political vision or a theological manifesto gets the answer in the subtext: both. And the government is supposed to deliver it – on papyrus, with incense, and tax-deductible.