Project 2025 invented by the Heritage Foundation for Trump and his MAGA minions is not a transition plan; it is a time machine.

by: Charles Francis

Originally posted on the Washington Blade website.

A think tank in Washington has built a time machine, an invention right out of H.G. Wells’s science fiction. They call their Time Machine a “transition plan for the next conservative President.” In fact, this plan is an invention designed to transport LGBTQ Americans back six decades to an unrecognizable landscape of isolation and invisibility. 

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is a policy and personnel database for MAGA warriors ready to take over all federal departments and agencies. LGBTQ Americans are nailed in “Promise #1.” Out of 992 pages, “sexual orientation” is introduced on page four — ahead of global threats, national sovereignty, the U.S. border and immigration issues, the economy, and “God-given individual rights”. 

“The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors,” the Time Machine plan begins. “This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity, diversity, equity and inclusion, gender, gender equality, gender awareness, gender-sensitive….out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contracts, grant regulation and piece of legislation that exists.”

Big government’s “purpose is to replace peoples’ natural loves and loyalties with unnatural ones,” according to the Time Machine that will enforce what is “natural law” in politics and religious morality. It is ready to transport us back in time to Federal policy and personnel issues before sexual orientation, before gender awareness and our identity itself.

The fight for gay and lesbian civil equality began on the battlefield of the U.S. Civil Service Commission. Decades of investigations and ruined lives were rooted in the language of federal personnel policy. Words like “revulsion,” “notorious,” and “nasty” morphed into the numbing regulatory-speak of “proper metonyms,” “suitability” and “overt conduct.” Prior to Stonewall, the struggle for equality began in Washington with hard-fought litigation and individual plaintiff’s challenges to federal personnel policy preserved today in the briefs, opinions, activists’ letters and declassified memos in the National Archives. For gay men and lesbians in the day, it was a brutal fight to build a new world of equality and shared legal status.

The Civil Service Commission Chairman John W. Macy (1917-1986), Lyndon Johnson’s “personnel man,” in 1966 cut to the core of the federal ban on gay and lesbian employment in a three-page letter written to the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C. Macy’s letter can be summarized as follows: you don’t exist.

“We do not subscribe to the view, which indeed is the rock upon which the Mattachine is founded, that “homosexual” is a proper metonym for an individual. Rather we consider the term “homosexual” to be properly used as an adjective to describe the nature of overt sexual relations or conduct… We see no third sex, no oppressed minority or secret society, but only individuals, and we judge their suitability for Federal employment in the light of their overt conduct.”

The world of John Macy is where the Heritage Time Machine will land. Homosexual is not the right “metonym” (oh, please), his figure of speech for human beings. You are not a noun. You are an adjective! You are a conduct, not an “oppressed minority.” There is no such thing as “sexual orientation.” The significance of the formal apology of the United States government delivered in 2009 by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Director to Mattachine Society President Frank Kameny, would be deleted. “I am writing today that this policy (of discrimination) which was at odds with the bedrock principles underlying the merit-based civil service, has been repudiated by the U.S. Government, due in large part to your determination,  life’s work, and to the thousands of Americans whose advocacy your words have inspired.” John Berry, OPM Director, continued, “I am happy to inform you that the memorandum signed by President Obama directs the OPM to issue guidance to all executive departments and agencies regarding their obligations to comply with these rules and regulations.” 

For LGBTQ Americans, our greatest achievement was the establishment of identity. We are a community, a people with a shared legal status facing discrimination and hundreds of anti-LGBTQ bills from state legislatures nationwide. There is a moment when the Time Traveler in Wells’s story “The Time Machine” is terrified to find himself stranded in another era. “At once like a lash across the face, came the possibility of losing my own age, of being left helpless in this strange new world.” With the Project 2025 Time Machine, we face that real possibility.

“History is written by the winners,” said Donald Trump’s Attorney General William Barr after the Justice Department’s decision to drop charges against Trump’s former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn for lying to the FBI about his contacts with the Russian Ambassador. It was actually George Orwell who wrote, “history is written by the winners.” Barr knows his Orwell. “So it largely depends upon whom is writing the history,” concluded Barr.  Will that be Heritage, or us?