The tricky thing about my MPhil project is that I am researching a moving target. I am attempting to take current political affairs, which are unfolding very very fast, and translate them into normative legal shapes. This requires keeping an eye on many issues, as they unfold, to see whether they evolve into main characters or wither into side quests.

Here is an example of one of the issues I’m tracking. What it is, in the long term, remains to be seen. But I thought it was a good example of how many arms and legs this project has grown.

As you will be aware, or at least you should be, one of the overt goals of the US Christian Nationalist movement is pronatalism. My interest in this issue (or any given issue) starts at the point where it becomes a matter of technology, regulation, or technology regulation. Which it did.

Page 476 of the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for the second Trump administration, Project 2025, stated:

TANF [the US equivalent of the child benefit payment] priorities are not implemented in an equally weighted way. Marriage, healthy family formation, and delaying sex to prevent pregnancy are virtually ignored in terms of priorities, yet these goals can reverse the cycle of poverty in meaningful ways. CMS [the benefits agency] should require explicit measurement of these goals.

If you don’t speak think tank: this was Heritage proposing intimate surveillance of sexual relations, meaning none outwith marriage and more within it, as a requirement for people receiving welfare benefits.

That tracking was presumably envisioned for the “interactive smartphone application”, which Heritage further proposed on page 479, to become mandatory for child benefit recipients. That app, in their minds, would already enable total surveillance of benefit recipients’ financial transactions, via being linked to the bank accounts where their benefits were being deposited. So, as their thinking went, why not just throw in mandatory surveillance of their sex lives while they’re at it, gamifying benefit recipients to make more babies if they’re married, forcing them to get married if they’re not, and ultimately penalising them if they’re fucking outside of holy matrimony.

…

The worst fucking app idea ever. I mean, literally, a fucking app.

…

Yes, dear readers, this is the state of modern American conservativism. Which is why the proposal caused consternation within the Heritage Foundation itself as a pivot “from its tradition of small government and free-market conservatism toward an ideology that embraces government intervention in affairs as private as procreation”. I do love a blue-on-blue fight.

Obviously there would be some fairly astonishing implications for privacy, and for human rights in general, were this proposal to become reality, hence me keeping an eye on it.

Last week there was an update on the proposal. Heritage released a more detailed policy paper on pronatalism and “the family” as they think it should look. (Specifically: heterosexual marriage only, procreation within marriage only, and no pornography, online dating, IVF, or financial support for parents. Bundle of fun, that lot.)

I had a look at the paper to see if they had advanced their earlier proposal for a sex snooping app.

They did not.

Not a word about it.

TANF and benefits were mentioned extensively, to be sure, in many equally batshit contexts, but the app idea was nowhere to be found.

Does that mean the idea has been shelved entirely? Let’s never assume so.

Does that mean that the blue-on-blue fight required a climbdown from the original idea? Perhaps.

Does this mean that someone in Heritage recalled, just for a moment, that mandatory gamified sex surveillance, overseen by government morality police, was one of the actual plotlines in Orwell’s 1984?

One lives in hope.

Further main characters and side quests to follow, on the road to my final MPhil in late 2027.

Thanks as always to everyone on my team at Strathclyde, who understand full well that my project is 90% nailing jelly to the wall and 10% writing about it, and are perfectly fine with that. I bloody love this place.

Whilst I probably should have included “NSFW” in this blog’s post title: FFS, I am Glaswegian. We use obscenities as punctuation. We can invent new swear words in real-time. We are artists. You know what you’re in for if you read what I write.