Gen Xers are no strangers to conspiracy theory. Growing up, we were fed on fear and left feral. The fact that we practically raised ourselves and thought quicksand and killer bees were going to be a bigger threat is a testament to that upbringing.

I have to admit, I came late to the table with “The Handmaid’s Tale.” I didn’t read it when I was a teenager, and I didn’t watch the Netflix series when it came out. But when I kept hearing references comparing Project 2025 (the Heritage Foundation playbook outlining the transition for the next conservative president) to Margaret Atwood’s fictional story, I was curious as to why. I started the series.

“The Handmaid’s Tale” portrays a dystopian view of an America overthrown by an autocratic theocracy whose aim is to repopulate the Earth after the rise of infertility threatens the extinction of the human race. To achieve its ends, the leaders of this new society force fertile women of “sinful” backgrounds into service as handmaids, whose sole purpose is to be impregnated by the godly, “chosen” men in power whose own wives are unable to conceive.

Crazy, right? This could never happen. Could it?

Before I began my binge, I had already read through a good bit of Project 2025 for reasons completely unrelated to these musings and there were a couple of parts that set off alarm bells. Aside from the fact that it calls for the elimination of the Department of Education and that the first season, aired in 2017, depicts an attack on the Capitol, I was most struck by the following.

Promise #1 of Project 2025 is to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.” Within this promise, the plan calls “for policymakers to elevate family authority, formation, and cohesion as their top priority and even use government power, including through the tax code, to restore the American family.”

The word “family/ies” is mentioned 215 times in this 900-page playbook, but it’s not until page 489 that it’s defined. According to Project 2025, “the Secretary should proudly state that men and women are biological realities that are crucial to the advancement of life sciences and medical care and that 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 authors argue that “outcomes for children raised in homes aside from a heterosexual, intact marriage are clear: All other family forms involve higher levels of instability (the average length of same-sex marriages is half that of heterosexual marriages); financial stress or poverty; and poor behavioral, psychological, or educational outcomes.”

At the present time, same-sex marriage is legal in all 50 states. Across the country, unmarried couples live together with and without children; single parents, mothers and fathers, raise biological and non-biological children by necessity and/or by desire. Single-family structures may be created by choice, through divorce, because of abuse. Children can be conceived deliberately through traditional or nontraditional means, by accident, and by criminally liable force.

The common American family today isn’t really nuclear; more like it went nuclear. And proponents who bemoan the loss of the “Leave it to Beaver” era of the stay-at-home wife and mother conveniently ignore the lack of other choices open to women by virtue of dependency within that time period. So, my question is this. How does Project 2025 propose “to restore” the nuclear family “us[ing] government power”?

How does a government go about dissolving same-sex marriage, turning one-parent households into two, preventing divorce, and preventing single persons from choosing to have and raise children alone? Without completely annihilating the unalienable rights set out in the Declaration of Independence?

Why are people are comparing Project 2025 to “The Handmaid’s Tale”? My guess is because they can still read.