Meet Moms for Liberty, the extremist group that wants to decide what your children read

Moms for Liberty made headlines last week with its summit in Philadelphia, which played host to former President Donald Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and plenty of other darlings of American conservatism. Not long before that, the group was in the news after the Southern Poverty Law Center included it in its report “The Year in Hate and Extremism.”

The group was founded in suburban Florida in 2021 amid anti-mask sentiment at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, but its focus has grown to include much more than opposing mask mandates. Its purported 275 chapters across 45 states have pushed to take over local public school boards for greater control over curriculums, and they oppose a wide variety of what they see as leftist priorities, from basic sex education to recognition for trans students.

The group presents itself as an organization that fights to protect “parents’ rights” in education. But what does that really mean?

Moms for Liberty was just one of 12 groups the SPLC designated “antigovernment extremist groups” that are “leading a movement to gain power through school boards to attack public education, ban books and control curricula”.

“Moms for Liberty was included in the 2022 report because of the group’s anti-government principles, its trafficking in conspiracy theories about an illegitimate government and its actions to censor school discussions around race, discrimination and LGBTQ+ identities,” the SPLC said in a statement to the American Independent Foundation.

Indeed, Moms for Liberty chapters have been at the center of book banning and anti-LGBTQ+ advocacy across the country. In May, a Moms for Liberty chapter pushed to remove 65 books from school shelves in Santa Rosa County, Florida. A chapter in Boone County, Kentucky, argued for 18 books to be taken out of schools there in February.

In April, a Moms for Liberty chapter in Hamilton County, Indiana, quoted Adolf Hitler in the first edition of its newsletter.

Joe Gaeta, director of oversight and engagement at the national legal advocacy group Democracy Forward, said Moms for Liberty is probably best described as a “fairly decentralized group of locally based organizations.”

Some of these are organized as 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations, and others are not, but whatever sort of entity each individual chapter is set up as, Gaeta said, they’re all part of a very well-organized effort.

“They are a vocal minority of parents,” Gaeta said. “They advocate for censorship and pulling books off the shelves. They’ve advocated for policies that are, I think, hurtful and are cruel for many LGBTQ children — pronoun policies, bathroom policies, things that many public schools are trying to really support children in enacting, and this vocal minority of parents are really standing in the way, trying to block those and stand in the way of them.”

Part of the danger of Moms for Liberty and of many other conservative groups is their marketing, said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.

“This is where the right wing excels,” Weingarten told the American Independent Foundation. “They create names for something that is basically the opposite of what they are.”

Despite what Moms for Liberty may claim, its efforts are harmful to kids, Weingarten said. The books they want to ban, the recognition and support for children who are members of the LGBTQ+ community that they oppose, are “the things that would actually help our kids survive and thrive and succeed in society, so we have to ensure that we have emotional and social learning in schools, we have to build relationships and deal with learning loss,” Weingarten said. “So when they try to ban books, when they try to pit the adults — who are really instrumental for kids — against each other, that’s doing the opposite.”

Gaeta echoed that idea. There might be nothing wrong with the general concept of making sure children are safe, he said, but Moms for Liberty’s efforts would do just the opposite.

“What they’re doing is very unreasonable, because they’re trying to dictate policy across the board,” he said. “And watch them run for school boards, watch them when they are elected to school boards. Look at their actions there.”

The forces that created Moms for Liberty in the first place shouldn’t be discounted, Weingarten said.

“Regardless of their divisiveness, there is an underlying issue that I think all of us need to address, which is even before COVID, social media and the climate in the country was creating a lot of disaffection and disconnection for students, and then when you layer COVID on top of that, we do have a problem in terms of our kids lack the confidence, the relational skills, that will help them really thrive in the future and so we have — regardless of those of us who may disagree vehemently with Moms for Liberty — we can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, we have to address the issues that have created the growth of Moms for Liberty, which is the anxiety and the concern that parents have for their kids.”

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.