Yesterday, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Year in Hate and Extremism 2022” report added parental-rights groups to its “Hate and Anti-Government groups Map,” including multiple chapters of Moms for Liberty, alongside neo-Nazis.
The SPLC defines a hate group as an organization whose beliefs or practices “attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics.” Margaret Huang, president and CEO of SPLC, stated regarding the report that “taking on the most hateful factions in our country is critical to dismantling white supremacy and advancing the civil rights of all people. . . . These groups are descending on Main Street America and disrupting people’s daily lives, too often with dire consequences for communities of color, Jewish people, and the LGBTQ+ community.”
The report further details how “hate groups were on the ground to intimidate people at school board and city council meetings” when the GOP “attacked inclusive education,” “LGBTQ people,” and “women and people who can get pregnant.” This is ridiculous. Parents protesting overtly sexual content in their young children’s schools may be controversial, but it is far from hate. To conflate preserving children’s innocence and influencing what sexualized material they are exposed to at a young age with bigotry symbolizes a twisted, hypersexual culture. This comes just weeks after the Department of Education accused a local Georgia school district of creating a hostile environment for its students after screening middle- and elementary-school library books for sexually explicit material.
SPLC describes Moms for Liberty as one of the leading “reactionary anti-student inclusion groups”; the group protesting a drag show is SPLC’s example of its hatred, implying quite heavily that drag is an immutable characteristic. Yet a glance at the nonprofit’s website shows that its women leaders (or, as SPLC would call them, “women and people who can get pregnant”) run the gamut of truly immutable characteristics. Their director of Hispanic Outreach is described as a “Colombian American businesswoman, journalist, philanthropist, strategy adviser, contributor and commentator, and humble servant to the Lord.” Tia Bess, director of National Engagement, left Philadelphia as a child due to gang violence and is now “a mom of three with a blended family” who hopes to spread the message that “her zip code didn’t define her.” Much of these moms’ mission is against having their children be defined by their immutable characteristics.
In addition to representing a genuinely diverse audience united by a belief in individual liberty, the group hosts charitable events, including an upcoming crafts session in New York for “volunteers to knit, crochet, or purchase mittens, gloves, hats and scarves for the next school year.” Its annual conference hosted mainstream Republicans like Ron Desantis and Ben Carson and, again, a diverse group of speakers. A Hasidic Jewish Rabbi who is the Tampa Police Department’s first Jewish chaplain and serves the FBI nationally also spoke. Meanwhile, the SPLC has inaccurately condemned Jewish organizations, such as the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, as “anti-Muslim hate groups,” failing to identify radical Islamic forms of hate. The SPLC narrative was later shared by an FBI-listed terrorist co-conspirator.
In short, Moms for Liberty is, if anything, more inclusive than the SPLC, and SPLC’s attack on parental-rights groups in particular with this year’s “hate map” reflects that it has once again weaponized the very serious label of “hate” against a popular and powerful cultural preference of parents educating their own children about controversial questions. SPLC fuels divisions, dismissing those who simply want some say in what their children learn. Their “hate map” is a rampage against individual rights.