In the ongoing culture war being waged by conservative right-wingers against the LGBT community and other progressive communities and causes, one player has recently emerged that has had remarkable success in promoting a right-wing agenda: an organization called Moms for Liberty.
Founded in early 2021 in Florida, Moms for Liberty (M4L) has expanded exponentially since then. It now boasts over 200 county chapters nationwide in almost all 50 states, and currently claims almost a quarter million members. Originally focused on opposing mask mandates in schools during the COVID-19 pandemic, M4L quickly expanded its agenda to oppose LGBT-positive policies in schools, LGBT-themed and diversity-positive books and materials in school libraries, alleged critical race theory subjects in curricula, and many other diversity-positive issues related to schools and students.
Recently, a pattern has emerged that is being repeated in almost every state. Inevitably, when M4L organizes a chapter in a particular county, that county's school district immediately is pressured to remove certain books from the school library or curriculum that the Moms find objectionable (or even pornographic). The subject matter deemed inappropriate is predictable: LGBT issues, racial issues, gender identity, sexual development, or anything seen promoting diversity‚ even history allegedly espousing critical race theory (without ever defining exactly what that is).
M4L has enjoyed rapid growth recently in Washington. The organization currently has active chapters in nine counties across the state, five of which have been established since October of last year: Kitsap, Pierce, King, Snohomish, Chelan, Douglas, Benton, Whitman, and Spokane. Not so coincidentally, this coincides with a rash of book challenges in schools across the state, such as in the Kent School District, the Central Kitsap School District, and Walla Walla Public Schools, among others.
Strategies
One factor explaining the meteoric growth of M4L is its expert use of social media, particularly Facebook. Each new chapter immediately creates its own Facebook group page as a means of membership recruitment and strategizing. The group pages are private, which allows page administrators to ensure that only local true believers gain access and membership.
Currently on Facebook there six group pages listed for M4L chapters in Washington‚ in Whitman, Snohomish, Pierce, Spokane, and King Counties. A sixth page covers multiple counties in the eastern part of the state.
Each page is identically structured and formatted, starting with a banner mission statement that reads: "Moms for Liberty [location of chapter] is dedicated to the survival of America by unifying, educating, and empowering parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government."
Another strategy that M4L has had a great deal of success with in other states like Florida and Pennsylvania is co-opting school administrations. First, they seek out administrators and school board members who share their conservative agenda and are willing to serve as allies for their cause. However, if a school board is unreceptive to M4L's demands, they will field their own candidates for the next school board election. School board elections tend to be a low priority for most voters, and so, in a distressingly large number of cases, this results in school boards dominated by M4L members and allies.
It's unclear how effective this strategy will be in Washington, given that most of this state's M4L chapters are too new to have participated in local elections‚ thus far.
Book bans
One resource that M4L can call on to facilitate its book-banning agenda is a national database it has created called BookLooks, a website that list copious numbers of allegedly objectionable books that can be found, or possibly be found, on school library shelves. Each book is given a rating; the higher the rating, the more objectionable the book is deemed.
The highest-rated books on the list are predictable, including such perennial offenders as Gender Queer, Heather Has Two Mommies, and The Handmaid's Tale. The authors listed comprise a veritable who's who of American letters, including Toni Morrison, Tennessee Williams, Zora Neale Hurston, Kurt Vonnegut, and Langston Hughes. Even Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor made the list.
A visit to Moms for Liberty's website gives a disturbing insight into the psychology of this organization. Clearly they see themselves‚ proudly‚ as warriors (their term) protecting America from the evils of a "woke" culture that seeks to destroy their vision of American life. And they enjoy enough substantial support from Republican elites to make them a formidable political player.
Washington is only the latest battleground on which the Moms for Liberty warriors have chosen to fight their culture war against progressivism, diversity, and equality.