What if they were right?

The Heritage Foundation just published their vision to save America by promoting one family model above all others. Their conviction is unshakeable.

This week, I read—well, skimmed—The Heritage Foundation’s new report, “Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years” before featuring it in my weekly news roundup. It frames heterosexual families as the foundation of civilization and proposes $280 billion in federal spending to incentivize early marriage, reward long marriages, and restrict adoption tax credits to heterosexual couples married for at least three years.

As I read, I asked myself a question: What if these people were right? Or at least, what if some of my beliefs were wrong?

It was a fleeting thought - I had a busy week - but I still paused to check the authors’ pictures at the bottom of the page—an honest-looking, somewhat diverse group, several from something called the DeVos Center for Human Flourishing, whose name would sound genuinely pleasant if it wasn’t for its family namesake.

The symmetry of certainty

“What if they were right?” is an interesting question because both sides—the people at the DeVos Center for Human Flourishing and us, in the LGBTQ+ movement—hold our beliefs with conviction. But two opposing beliefs can’t both be right. One of us is wrong about what a family is and how government should support it.

You would probably agree that the report contains some truth. The nuclear family served an evolutionary purpose—children raised by two committed parents generally had better survival and developmental outcomes in resource-scarce environments. Strong family bonds and commitment create stability that benefits individuals and society: children in stable households show better educational outcomes, lower incarceration rates, and improved mental health. The report is also correct that family formation faces real economic barriers. Housing costs have outpaced wage growth dramatically. The gig economy has stripped away the employer-sponsored benefits (health insurance, paid leave, retirement security) that once made family formation economically viable for the middle class. Add student debt, the elimination of pension systems, and genuine geopolitical instability, and you have legitimate structural disincentives to having children that transcend personal choice.

To their credit, the authors appear to even be nuanced about how exclusionary their 250 years vision for the family can be. Jay Richards, one of the report’s co-authors, said:

This is not a criticism of the complex life circumstances of people who, through choice or circumstance, don’t live in such a home. It is a strong recognition, however, that children, adults, and society itself can not flourish as they should without robust and widespread family formation.

And yet, our beliefs diverge sharply. I’m convinced that LGBTQ+ people are part of the natural order. I believe my children—born through surrogacy and raised between two homes—have every chance to “flourish” as their peers, even if our family doesn’t fit the traditional mold (see also Meloni and our children). I believe LGBTQ+ people should have equal access to adoption. I also believe that the existence of trans people, like that of gay people, is not an “anti-family” force. More importantly, I believe governments should support all families, communities, and belonging—instead of working to marginalize “non-traditional” families further.

Could it be that I’m wrong and the Heritage folks are right?

The trouble with self-serving beliefs

This isn’t such a wild thought. My beliefs are, in many ways, self-serving. I need to believe that I—and my children—fit within some divine or natural design, that the cause I’ve given my life to is just. The alternative would be unbearable: that I’m a mistake of nature, that raising children was a selfish act (“put[ting] the desires of adults over the needs of children” is what the report denounces in its first paragraph), that the years spent fighting for queer liberation were wasted. History, after all, is full of people who built their identities around beliefs that comforted them—and in doing so, harmed others.

Last week in Izamal, Mexico, I stood before a Franciscan monastery built atop a Mayan pyramid—its stones repurposed in the monks’ sincere belief they were bringing enlightenment. I thought of watching Cousteau’s voyages in documentaries at my grandparents’ house as a child, only to discover years later that his ship, the now infamous Calypso, had destroyed coral reefs in the name of exploration. Similarly, my former colleagues at the World Bank, were convinced in the 1980s that Structural Adjustment Loans would lift nations out of poverty, yet instead stoking debt crises and deepening inequality across continents. Each misguided belief was backed by institutions, experts, and conviction.

I once served on the board of a criminal justice reform organization and discovered the executive director was in favor of prison abolition—eliminating jails entirely. While well-meaning on the surface, this position struck me as neither realistic nor honest.

It’s incredibly easy to end up fighting on the wrong side of things. The odds that we’re truly on the right one are slim. I’m always struck by how many people are certain they follow the one true faith, even though, statistically, the chance of being born into the “right” religion is vanishingly small.

This year, LGBTQ+ leaders begun to admit that we sometimes overreached. We now concede that when our demands shifted from asking others to accept how we live to insisting they change how they live and speak, we lost perspective. Our handling of debates over police and corporate participation in Pride, the exclusion of queer voices deemed insufficiently pure, or the divisive rollout of new language around identity (my favorite is that 2018 video of a French activist introducing the country in 2018 to the concept of non-binarity in all the wrong possible ways)—all remind us that conviction does not guarantee wisdom. We, too, can be wrong.

Stephen Miller Is So Sure of Himself

It’s not just historical mishaps and our own excesses that fuel my self-doubt. The virulence and conviction of our opponents last year was equally challenging. When Stephen Miller spoke at the Charlie Kirk memorial in September, his fighting words shocked me particularly as I knew he was directly referring to people like me:

We will defend this world. We will defend goodness. We will defend light. We will defend virtue. You cannot terrify us. You cannot frighten us. You cannot threaten us. Because we are on the side of goodness. We are on the side of God.

His certainty was chilling, but also familiar. How many times have I heard LGBTQ+ leaders speak with the same eloquence, passion, and intransigence? How can any of us be sure that our conviction is truth and not self-deception?​

Why I Trust Our Journey More

Yet, trust the LGBTQ+ perspective more—not because we hold any moral high ground or are superior, but because of what our experience teaches. It begins with concealment and returns, often painfully, to honesty (as I’ve written in The Truth About Lies). Many of us start life hiding from those we love most—parents, teachers, priests—because lying feels essential to survival. Coming out is a deliberate act of truth-telling, a conscious choice to rebuild life around honesty. That kind of self-interrogation demands a rigor I rarely find in those who believe they’ve never strayed from the truth.

We are not born in honesty, we chose it.

Of course, not every queer person lives this truth fully. Some have traded honesty for proximity to power, or turned our hard-won self-knowledge into instruments of ambition or denial. We’ve seen queer figures rise by flattering the systems that once rejected them. Think George Santos for example.

Secondly, I trust our viewpoint on families more because, at its best, it’s about how we live—not how others should. We’re not trying to impose our families and communities as the best model or make it universal; we’re asking for the freedom to live it with dignity and equality. In that sense, our vision stands in sharp contrast to the Heritage report, which aims to discourage any family that doesn’t fit its narrow definition.

Thirdly, I also find our perspective more trustworthy because LGBTQ+ people have rarely had privilege to defend or an establishment to serve. We have less vested interests. For much of history, there was nothing more stigmatized than being gay. Our pursuit of truth hasn’t been about protecting power, status, or capital—as it often seems to be for families like the DeVoses—but about building a world where no one has to hide to belong.

This is why Stephen Miller’s words particularly miss the mark when he claims in his abhorrent speech:

You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness. You are jealousy. You are envy. You are hatred. You are nothing. You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing.

The opposite is true, and I suspect Stephen Miller knows it. Queer people are creative not despite our marginalization but because of it—our survival has required imagining new ways to exist within or beyond inherited rules. That tension with the status quo is what fuels creation. Conservatism itself isn’t inherently uncreative; stability and tradition can nurture profound meaning. But when it becomes about protecting privilege or preserving hierarchy—when it hardens into fear of change—it stops sustaining and starts stifling.

This should be a call for humility at the Heritage Foundation. History is full of confident errors once upheld in the name of tradition: scientific racism presented as biological fact, women’s supposed intellectual inferiority justified as medical truth, interracial marriage bans defended as safeguards of civilization, the divine right of kings framed as natural order, and geocentrism treated as settled science. Each was championed by experts who warned that challenging these ideas would destroy society—the same kind of rhetoric the Heritage Foundation now uses to defend its narrow definition of family.

The humility of uncertainty

I don’t claim to be always right. I’ve made mistakes and chosen imperfect paths more times than I can count. But I’ve always been searching—for myself, for family, for community, and for ways to keep those possibilities open for others like me. That honest searching matters more than certainty, especially when facing people who’ve never had to question whether they deserve to exist.

Vincent Delerm, who is one of my favorite singers, recorded a tender version of Les gens qui doutent (see I love people who doubt) that has become, for me, the definitive homage to people who hesitate and question themselves. Today we are faced with the brutality of those who claim to know, always, what is right. It is yet another symptom of a return to cringe masculinity in America. I prefer those who are always doubting.

The Heritage Foundation’s authors look like decent people. I’m sure they believe they’re helping in charting a pathway for the next 250 years that marginalize further our families. But history suggests that when people with institutional power and cultural dominance claim their way of life is the only path to civilization’s survival, we should be deeply skeptical—especially when those making the claim have never had to question whether they deserve their place in the world.

So no, afterall, I don’t think they are right.