US hard-right policy group condemned for ‘dehumanising’ anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric

An exhaustive manifesto for the next conservative US president produced by Project 2025, an initiative led by the hard-right Heritage Foundation, uses “dehumanising language” about LGBTQ+ Americans too extreme even for candidates currently seeking the Republican presidential nomination, a leading advocate said.

Related: ‘Project 2025’: plan to dismantle US climate policy for next Republican president

“The dehumanising language is consistent with the way the right talks about LGBTQ+ people overall,” said Sasha Buchert, director of the Non-Binary and Transgender Rights Project for Lambda Legal.

“They’re never talking about transgender people or gay and lesbian people, it’s always referring to them as an ideology of some kind, or an ‘ism’. There’s no humanity involved … Not even the presidential candidates in the Republican debates are embracing this kind of rhetoric.”

Donald Trump is the clear leader of that Republican race, despite facing 91 criminal charges and multiple civil suits. Primary candidates have eagerly embraced anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric, particularly over state anti-trans laws and the place of LGBTQ+ issues in public education. This summer, however, Trump’s closest polling rival, Ron DeSantis, was forced on to the defensive over an online video that used harsh imagery and language to accuse Trump of being too soft on LGBTQ+ issues.

By its own description, Project 2025 is the work of “a broad coalition of over 70 conservative organisations”, aiming to shape the presidential transition should a rightwing candidate beat Joe Biden next year.

In the words of Paul Dans, its director, Project 2025 is “systematically preparing to march into office and bring a new army, aligned, trained, and essentially weaponised conservatives ready to do battle against the deep state”.

Such language may echo conspiracy-tinged rants by Trump and his supporters, but that “army” has produced something solid: Mandate for Leadership: the Conservative Promise, a 920-page document that sets out policy wishes across the breadth of the federal government.

On LGBTQ+ rights, Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, sets the tone with his introduction.

Complaining that in Biden’s America “children suffer the toxic normalisation of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries”, Roberts writes: “Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualisation of children … is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to first amendment protection.”

He goes on to suggest wide-ranging criminal penalties.

Purveyors of pornography, Roberts writes, “are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”

In a later chapter, on the Department of Health and Human Services, Roger Severino, Heritage Foundation vice-president of domestic policy, advocates a more focused approach: “The president should direct agencies to rescind regulations interpreting sex discrimination provisions as prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, sex characteristics, etc.”.

Such draconian pronouncements have prompted alarm among progressives, over apparent implications including the possible criminalisation of LGBTQ+ issues, expression and people.

In contrast, legal and presidential transition sources suggested that such extreme implications of the Mandate for Leadership were unlikely to assume concrete form any time soon, given existing guardrails.

No incoming Republican administration would be required or guaranteed to pick up the Mandate for Leadership, let alone implement all its demands.

Furthermore, as reported by the New York Times and by the Guardian in relation to climate policy, implementation of many Project 2025 recommendations would rely on broad acceptance of unitary executive theory, a contested vision of strong presidential power, from a compliant Congress and supreme court.

Implementation of “Schedule F”, a plan formulated by extreme Trump allies to purge the federal bureaucracy of officials deemed insufficiently loyal, would also likely be needed, to force government departments to accept a reshaping of US law and life by presidential fiat.

But as the former Trump White House aides Johnny McEntee and Russell Vought, key drivers of Schedule F, are also involved in Project 2025, so advocates say the Mandate for Leadership should be taken seriously.

On Monday, Rachel Bitecofer, a progressive political scientist and activist, said: “Every incoming Republican administration is handed the Manual For Leadership. Two thirds of the 2016 manual was implemented. The Project 2025 manual … purges the civil service of all (perceived) political ‘enemies’ [and] advises to ignore checks and balances of the constitution. Pass it on.”

Asked if Project 2025 could be seen as part of an attempt to move the Overton window (a political science concept describing “policies that are widely accepted throughout society as legitimate options”), perhaps in the way years of rightwing invective paid off last year with the removal of abortion rights, Buchert said: “Absolutely. One hundred percent.

“Clearly, they’re embracing ideology, not what the American public wants or needs. This is being driven by a far-right desire to turn America back to the 1920s, or even further back.

“It’s not just about LGBTQ+ people. It’s about women’s rights. It’s about the right to obtain education that reflects your existence as an African American person in this country. There are so many strands where you can see it clearly being pushed by a small fraction of the country doggedly pursuing their ideology.”

Pointing to victories for Lambda and other advocacy groups over anti-trans and other rightwing laws at the state level, Buchert said: “These attacks are out of step with the way Americans view and trust LGBTQ+ people, so I’m confident they’ll continue to fail.”

But, she said, efforts such as Project 2025 “will add more fuel to the fire and encourage more anti-LGBTQ legislation … reflect[ing] the worldview that they want, where LGBTQ+ people live lives of quiet desperation and fear”.