MomLinks: Come Watch This Terrible Moms for Liberty Interview

What "ideology" does Moms for Liberty oppose? Oh you know... the one...

Right-wing educational panics seldom name their targets outright, even if their intent is obvious. Efforts to suppress Black history, LGBTQ+ support networks, and programs that benefit low-income students are recast as campaigns to curtail “critical race theory,” “grooming,” and “handouts.”

Conservative school board warriors rely on these euphemisms where their real policies are morally unsavory and electorally unpopular. So it was a real treat to watch the founders of Moms for Liberty flounder when pressed to explain their mission on a new 60 Minutes episode. 

During a sit-down with interviewer Scott Pelley, Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice wheeled out the group’s talking point that “parents send their children to school to be educated, not indoctrinated into ideology.” 

“What ideology are they being indoctrinated into?” Pelley asked.

An uncomfortable silence followed, after which Moms for Liberty co-founder Tina Descovich replied “let’s just say children in America cannot read.” 

You can check out that interview at Media Matters, which has also compiled some of the right’s damage control over the less-than-flattering 60 Minutes episode.

Here are some more MomLinks to send you into the weekend:

-Speaking of Descovich, Florida’s Senate declined this week to confirm the Moms for Liberty co-founder to a state ethics commission. The move doesn’t bar Descovich from being confirmed in the future. But it’s a noteworthy pass by a Republican state legislature, after Gov. Ron DeSantis initially appointed Descovich to the board last year. 

A spokesperson for Florida’s Senate President (a Republican) told the News Service of Florida that Descovich’s current role as chair of a Moms for Liberty political action committee was giving some state senators pause. “There is a concern that Ms. Descovich’s employment could constitute lobbying the Legislature. That issue requires additional review prior to Senate confirmation,” she said.

-In Texas, meanwhile, a conservative majority on the state Board of Education has set off an acceleration toward the right. This week, a well-funded conservative campaign propelled a 27-year-old pastor to school board victory over a moderate Republican incumbent. The newcomer, Brandon Hall is campaigning on “dismantling liberal curriculums [sic], like Critical Race Theory and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” in favor of education “rooted in conservative values.” (See the first paragraph of this newsletter.) Hall will run against a Democratic challenger in the general election.

A Rice University professor of political science told the Dallas Morning News that the board’s political shift mirrors the “current rightward drift of the Texas Republican Party.”

“Previously, you often had a bipartisan approach,” he said. But a new slate of Republican leaders’ “belief is, ‘Why should we compromise when we are the majority?’”

-Alabama lawmakers have passed a new, hastily composed law that will offer legal protection for in vitro fertilization clinics, allowing them to resume operations after a state supreme court ruling held that frozen embryos are legally children. But while the law is intended to allow fertility clinics to keep their doors open, it does not resolve the troubling question of “fetal personhood” implied in the initial court ruling. The ideology argues that fertilized eggs are legal persons with rights that surpass those of pregnant people. If adopted broadly (and politicians like Nikki Haley have signaled their interest in doing so), the Alabama Supreme Court’s definition of life would prohibit not just IVF, but abortion.

-Anti-choice activists sometimes point to adoption as an alternative to abortion. But narratives around adoption often erase birth mothers’ desires, their grief, and the circumstances that led them to separate from their children, according to an New York Magazine interview with sociologist Gretchen Sisson. Sisson, the author of the new book Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood, described an American fixation on adoption as a feel-good distraction from the necessity of abortion rights, affordable fertility care, and support for vulnerable families.

“It was clear to me that adoption was understood as this recurring panacea for all these issues — if you support and promote adoption, then you don’t need to have access to abortion,” she told New York. “You don’t need to support vulnerable families. You don’t need to ensure that health insurance is covering infertility treatments and other ways of family building. That made me want to look at it more carefully and see how the actual experiences of the people behind adoption reflected this social and cultural idea that we have of it.”

-Book ban bills keep coming, sometimes in creative new forms, a new PEN America analysis found. Alabama is advancing its own version of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” legislation, which would censor education on gender and sexual orientation for students in grades K-12. Utah, meanwhile, is mulling a bill that would ban a book statewide if three school districts labeled it “objective sensitive material.” If enacted, the bill would immediately ban certain popular titles that have sustained challenges, and empower concern-trolls to eliminate titles from libraries across the state.

-But! In Oregon, lawmakers are advancing their own book ban ban. The state’s Senate Bill 1583 would prohibit book bans on the basis of characteristics like race or gender. The bill, one of the most controversial in the state Senate, will not have a chance to pass during this legislative session, which adjourned on Friday. Oregon Public Broadcasting described the bill as the subject of a last-minute stalling tactic by Republican opponents, who invoked a legislative rule that allowed them to run out the clock by introducing a counter-measure to 1583 in the last days of session.

Hey thanks for reading MomLeft, a new newsletter for moms on the left! That’s it for this week’s MomLinks. Hope to catch you this weekend for my regular free newsletter!