When the Heritage Foundation released its priorities for 2026, much of the critical attention was focused on the familiar: the organization’s plans for deregulation, executive power, immigration, and building on Project 2025. Even more fundamentally, the 2026 priorities include social goals, such as restructuring families to model traditional (that is to say, Christian) ideals, using governmental power to enforce traditional gender roles, and delegitimizing relationships outside of its ideal of a married, heterosexual couple having as many children as possible.

While these specific goals are not laid out in Heritage’s sales pitch, its directors have articulated them with unusual candor in essays associated with their roles. For example, Scott Yenor, the organization’s Director of the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies, recently described the supposed need to undo gender integration in education. This renewed push for sex-segregated education is not a narrow policy proposal or a technocratic debate about pedagogy. It is a counterrevolutionary project aimed at undoing constitutional equality and reinstating a rigid, hierarchical vision of sex roles under the guise of civic renewal.

The recent essay defending “sex-specific education” as necessary to preserve the U.S. republic offers a clear statement of this agenda. Framed as a lament for the decline of the Virginia Military Institute after United States v. Virginia, the piece argues that the Supreme Court’s decision forced VMI to abandon its true purpose: cultivating “manly honor, martial valor, and public-spirited ambition.” According to this account, admitting women did not merely........

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