The Real Targets of Project 2025’s War on Porn

The Promise campaign didn’t only target lawmakers. It also came with a guide for parents, warning that their children were being exposed to “a radical sexual ideology,” as evidenced in comprehensive sex education, curricula on LGBTQ history, and policies barring discrimination against LGBTQ students and school staff. All of this is collapsed into a dangerous “ideology” or agenda. “The promise begins with the pledge to protect children’s minds from graphic sexual content and the sexual orientation and gender identity agenda in the classroom,” announced Heritage. That slip from “graphic sexual content” to “the sexual orientation and gender identity agenda” is telling, and a sign of more to come.

The “Promise to America’s Children” campaign is not only an American project. It’s one facet of a global effort to roll back progress around gender and sexuality, as seen in Russia and Hungary and other countries that have marshalled protecting “children” and “families” in service of eroding civil rights for women and LGBTQ people. Despite homosexuality being decriminalized in Russia in 1993, the Russian Supreme Court last year decreed that the “international LGBT movement” is an “extremist organization.” Earlier this year, under Russia’s new so-called “propaganda law,” employees at queer and drag venues were charged with “promoting non-traditional sexual relationships and preferences” and “promoting non-traditional sexual relations among the visitors of the bar.” Others have been convicted under the law for wearing frog-shaped rainbow earrings, and for posting a photo of a Pride flag online. Such policing is part of what Putin has called defending “traditional family values”—a framing that borrows from conservatives in the United States.

That exchange goes both ways: Kevin Roberts has had a receptive audience with Viktor Orbán in Hungary. “We must not give up on our core values: #family, #sovereignty, #liberty and #faith. This was at the heart of our discussion with @Heritage president @KevinRobertsTX,” the prime minister posted to X in November 2022. Roberts replied, “It was an honor, @PM_ViktorOrban, to meet with you. One thing is clear from visiting Hungary and from being involved in current policy and cultural debates in America: the world needs a movement that fights for Truth, for tradition, for families, and for the average person.” There is much in Project 2025’s vision of “tradition” and “families” that evokes Orbán’s rule, such as Hungary’s own anti-LGBT propaganda law and his anti-abortion laws.