PHILADELPHIA — The 650 Moms for Liberty members gathered this week at the Marriott in downtown Philadelphia have had a challenging month. First, the Southern Poverty Law Center, an anti-hate watchdog, labeled the moms an anti-government extremist group for their attempts to ban books and restrict classroom discussion around gender and race. Two weeks later, one of its chapters was forced to apologize for quoting Adolf Hitler in one of its newsletters.
The wave of terrible news did little to discourage five Republican presidential hopefuls, including former President Donald Trump, from addressing the gathering of parental rights activists who have already begun seeing the backlash to their new political movement.
The candidates happily pandered to the group, whose organizers invited the entire presidential field, Democrats included, to their second annual Joyful Warriors National Summit. Republicans view these women — and the smattering of men here — as potential kingmakers and the event as an opportunity to woo the right’s fastest-growing constituency.
“I really believe that parents in this country should be able to send their kids to school, should be able to let them watch cartoons or just be kids without having some agenda shoved down their throat,” said Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.), popular with this crowd for championing controversial laws that bolster parental rights in education. “This has gone on across the country for far too long — 2024 is the time to put up or shut up.”
Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley stated in an apparent reference to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s designation of the right-wing mom group: “When they mentioned this was a terrorist organization, I said, ‘Well then count me a mom for liberty!’”
Moms for Liberty (M4L) did not even exist just three years ago. Founded by three Florida moms opposed to mask and vaccine mandates in classrooms, Moms for Liberty instantly became a force in school board races, throwing its grassroots political heft behind hundreds of candidates who support its mission of “defending parental rights at all levels of government.” It now boasts dozens of chapters across most of the country and a membership of over 115,000. And in a sign of its broader ambitions, the group has four PACs, including a federal super PAC that doesn’t have to disclose its donors. However, the entities have not reported significant fundraising since the most recent filing deadline.
M4L’s actual influence over the wider electorate is unproven. Many of the ideas that form the bedrock of the group’s identity — specifically around banning books, restricting transgender rights, and controlling how race and gender are discussed in classrooms — are deeply controversial and held Republicans back in last year’s midterms. Headlines about Hitler and the Southern Poverty Law Center are repelling to everyone but a small slice of the hardcore GOP base. (And the Hitler story was especially unflattering considering M4L’s core argument that students aren’t learning basic history and literacy in schools.)
The summit was met with a fair amount of live blowback from the left. Hundreds of protesters blocked the streets on Thursday night outside the Museum of the American Revolution as coach buses rolled up filled for its opening reception. The American Historical Association opposed the gathering at the museum over the group’s attempts to “silence and harass teachers.” The following morning, dozens of dancing, chanting and Pride flag-waving counter-protesters, some from the local youth communist league, set up shop outside the downtown hotel with signs proclaiming “PHILLY IS A BLACK CITY” and “TRANSITION IS JOYFUL.”
The group’s allies waved off all the negative attention as liberal smears. “The left is even slandering Moms for Liberty,” Trump said during his keynote address. “You’re not the threat to America. You’re the best thing that ever happened to America.”
Moms for Liberty formed just as the parental rights movement was on the verge of its first major victory with the election of Republican Glenn Youngkin in Virginia. Youngkin won the governorship of a light blue state in part by tapping into the political potency of parental fury, a force that has only intensified in the years since many parents found themselves stressed to their breaking points during the pandemic.
“We were quarantining thousands of children at a time in our district. They were never sick. They never had COVID. They were missing a lot of school. So that’s what got me started,” said Jennifer Pippin, a 38-year-old operating room nurse who founded one of the nation’s first M4L chapters in Florida and whose children were in middle school when COVID struck.
“And then it got into, you know, finding pornography in the schools,” she continued. “We had to play whack-a-mole. Every time we think that everything’s kinda good, something else pops up.”
As the pandemic waned, the moms turned their attention to “obscene materials,” books seen as depicting “hardcore pornography,” and LGBTQ+ or political themes deemed age-inappropriate. Titles that came up frequently in conversations: “Push,” a 1996 novel about an illiterate Black teen who endures horrific sexual abuse, and “Gender Queer,” a more recent graphic novel about coming out as nonbinary — books with complex themes that are frequently rated the most challenged in the country.
It’s not just books. Down the road from the convention in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, the new conservative, M4L-backed school board majority banned Pride flags and enacted a “neutrality” policy later used as the basis for removing a prominently displayed quote from Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize-winning author Elie Wiesel. The move fed into broader criticism that the moms are going overboard in their attempts to prevent “indoctrination” around diversity and equity.
“No one is pushing pornography. The idea that teachers are indoctrinating and grooming students is just absurd,” said Anne Ferguson, a teacher from Bucks County who retired just after the pandemic’s onset and protesting outside the Marriott on Friday. Ferguson said her school board is now weighing whether to rewrite social studies curriculums. “That’s a slippery slope. Like, where do we go with that? Then we get into revisionist history. It’s a concern.”
The view from the other side, courtesy of Amber, a Mom for Liberty from Pennsylvania who didn’t want to share her full name for professional reasons: “I’m a school teacher, and if someone accused me of being a book banner for preventing a child from accessing something that’s developmentally harmful for them, I would have to think they have another agenda.”
Amber said she recently accepted a new teaching role at a Catholic school where she can embrace more conservative ideals. “I’m free to not want children to be sterilized, aspirated, have their breasts cut off, be put on bone-destroying drugs, or get driven insane by this ‘force everyone to live your lie’ agenda,” she said.
“We don’t ban books. No one’s banning books.”
- M4L co-founder Tiffany Justice
M4L is not out to ban books, co-founder Tiffany Justice, a woman with a name somehow perfectly suited to her mission, told HuffPost, quickly interjecting at the first mention of the phrase. Justice sounded like she had been posed this same question a million different ways this week as she and co-founder Tina Descovich engaged in a media blitz to promote the summit.
“We don’t ban books. No one’s banning books. Write the books, print the books, publish the books, sell the books. Put the books in the public library if your community wants to pay for the books,” Justice said. “But when you talk about a children’s public school library, not putting certain books in the libraries isn’t banning books. It’s called curating content. And that is done for every library. That’s the job of a library. You wouldn’t have the same books in seminary that you would have in a medical college.”
But if the books happen to already be in the library, and they’re not offensive, then why not just... leave them there?
“That’s precious library shelf space,” Justice said.
M4L, according to Justice, also had nothing to do with the controversial “reshelving” of the book based on poet Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb,” the poem Gorman read at President Joe Biden’s inauguration. The Florida district that moved the book to a more advanced children’s library said it contained hate speech, a designation that confounded Gorman’s followers. Even Justice said she didn’t have an issue with the book but defended the district’s right to decide on its placement.
“We have local control in America. It’s very important,” said Justice, a member of her school board in Indian River County, Florida, before founding Moms for Liberty. “And I respect the decision the school board made … I didn’t have any problem with the book, personally. But again, it was the decision of the school board. It was their decision to make.”
The moms proudly call themselves “joyful warriors,” conjuring images of M4L members clad in sparkly pumps and skinny jeans and navy T-shirts with the M4L tagline: “WE DON’T CO-PARENT WITH THE GOVERNMENT.” But this war is also tinged with a darker element: Existential dread about a country that became unrecognizable to many during COVID.
“My children are grown, and I have grandchildren now. I worry what’s coming down the pike for them,” said Barbara Sonafelt, a 66-year-old M4L member and court reporter from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
Sonafelt ran for her local school board this year but lost her primary. Despite the negative reaction, she said she’s gotten from people in her community who judge her harshly for being an M4L member, she plans to run again.
“I got called a Nazi,” Sonafelt said, describing a confrontation she had with someone in her grocery store who saw her Moms for Liberty emblem and accused her of seeking to ban books.
She added, “Nobody wants to listen to the truth.”