Moms for Liberty may sue the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). By labeling Moms for Liberty as “extremist” and “antigovernment,” the SPLC “put a target on the back of every American parent, every American mom.” The Moms are pushing back.
The SPLC released its report in June that lists twelve groups as extremists. The report is titled “The Year in Hate and Extremism 2022.” Moms for Liberty is on their list. The SPLC claims that Moms for Liberty’s primary goals are to “fuel right-wing hysteria and to make the world a less comfortable or safe place” for students who are “Black, LGBTQ or who come from LGBTQ families.” The group is hated by leftist organizations like the SPLC because it stands up for parental rights, demands school reform, pushes back on teachers unions, and opposes Covid-19 pandemic shutdowns and mandates. In other words, the organization refuses to succumb to the overreaches of authoritarian leftists in the lives of families.
Moms for Liberty is a nonprofit parents’ rights group that began on Jan. 1, 2021. A Wall Street Journal reporter spoke with Tina Descovich and Tiffany Justice, co-founders of the organization. Descovich is 49-years-old and the mother of five children. Justice is 44-years-old and the mother of four. The group’s headquarters are in Florida – “between Miami and Jacksonville.” Specific details on the location are not given because of the threats made against the women. There is no signage or any identifying features on its modest office. The women say they have received a deluge of threats by email, voicemail, and handwritten letters. There are so many regular threats that there is a deputy at the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office assigned specifically to review each threat. “Someone calling himself Satan writes to me every week,” Ms. Descovich says wryly. “He lives in Denver.”
The SPLC works to minimize the reach of Moms for Liberty. At one time, the SPLC had a reputation as a civil rights group that fought groups like the Ku Klux Klan with lawsuits and cooperation with law enforcement. The media continues to describe the SPLC as a civil rights group but its focus has shifted to attacking conservative organizations, labeling them as hate groups.
Tiffany Justice said that the labels of extremist and antigovernment are lies. The designation in the SPLC’s report is a smear against the Moms and what it does is “put a target on the back of every American parent, every American mom.” Apparently, parents speaking up in order to maintain authority in their children’s lives “fuels right-wing hysteria.” The problem with that trope is that parental rights are a non-partisan issue. It’s not a red or blue issue. It’s an American issue that every parent faces. By labeling concerned parents as extremists, the SPLC is smearing the Moms and using the designation as a weapon against their group.
So, Moms for Liberty is looking into suing the SPLC for defamation. They are exploring their legal options. Justice says they have “retained the best plaintiff-side defamation firm in the United States to hold the SPLC accountable for their hateful targeting of our members.” Defamation lawsuits are difficult to win under U.S. law. Judges usually dismiss cases against the SPLC. There was one case in 2018 when the SPLC had to pay Maajid Nawaz more than $3M to settle his claim that the SPLC defamed him. The group labeled Nawaz as an “anti-Muslim extremist.”
The SPLC’s smear campaign against the Moms is working. The group has expanded into 46 states. When events are being planned in various states, some venues are refusing to host them, likely due to press reports and how Moms for Liberty are labeled.
The SPLC’s smear appears to have done damage. Moms for Liberty had planned an event last month at Milwaukee’s Italian Community Center. “After an inquiry from the Journal Sentinel,” wrote Rory Linnane, a reporter for that paper, “Bartolotta Restaurants, which books events for the center, said it would not be hosting any Moms for Liberty event.” The first words in Ms. Linnane’s article were “Moms for Liberty, a group designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an extremist antigovernment organization. .
In Davis, Calif., a librarian shut down a Moms for Liberty meeting on grounds that a speaker who objected to male athletes competing against women and girls violated a rule against “misgendering.” Again, local news coverage prominently cited the SPLC’s designation.
The media blindly goes along with the SPLC labels.
The mission of Moms for Liberty is not a complicated one. And, their slogan is one that regular American families support.
The mission of Moms for Liberty, Ms. Descovich says, is to “unify, educate and empower parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government.” She came up with the group’s name, while Ms. Justice wrote its catchiest slogan: “We do not co-parent with the government.”
Both Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich were elected to their local school boards. They met in 2019. Descovich was in Brevard County and Justice just south in Indian River County. Descovich was a Republican and Justice was politically unaffiliated. Both moms felt compelled to get involved in school politics because of experiences with their own children. The women point to school propaganda in the re-writing of American history and the unacceptable condition of some public schools.
Ms. Descovich’s eureka moment came in 2014 when her son was in seventh grade. “I started seeing assignments coming home that were concerning,” she says. “He brought home an assignment that I have to this day. He got 100-plus on it, and the teacher had said, ‘Great job!’ When he handed it to me, he said, ‘I got an A.’ . . . It was a ‘wanted’ poster for Christopher Columbus, for ‘crimes against humanity.’ ”
She was so shocked that she spent “months buying every book I could find on Christopher Columbus, reading everything I could, trying to figure out what had changed since I’d studied history.”
Ms. Justice says that for her, “it wasn’t so much curriculum as the physical condition of my kids’ school.” Hallways would flood; roofs leaked; tiles would dislodge and fall onto classroom floors and desks—and rodents infested the place. “We were in a PTA meeting, and a rat ran up a half-wall.”
The school’s principal wouldn’t raise the issue with higher-ups. “She said she didn’t want problems with the district,” Ms. Justice says. “But it was really more about the fact that she didn’t want anyone paying too much attention to her school. Because we had a literacy rate for African-American students that was in the low 20th percentile, and the school still got an A from the grading system in the state.”
Ms. Descovich adds that her son got the highest possible grade on his end-of-class exam in seventh grade even though he missed half the answers. At that, the two moms dissolve in laughter.
They laugh because they know. They know that school districts protect themselves and they celebrate themselves. Almost half of Florida fourth-graders can’t read at grade level but no one pays a price, thanks to teacher union contracts. What the women call plausible remedies are shut down. Ms. Descovich says, “if you want to give bonuses to your teachers who are willing to serve in your poorest schools, you can’t do it.”
Moms for Liberty is about more than just education, though. They are supportive for parental rights, the fundamental right of parents to make decisions on the upbringing of their children. These decisions include for medical care and “moral and religious upbringing.” They see the group as fighting for the survival of America by protecting the role of mothers and the autonomy of parents. At the core of society is the family unit. The government does not have the right to raise children. That includes the teachers unions.
Leftists have seized control of the next generation over the course of time, as teachers unions grew more powerful, wealthy, and corrupt. We see the effects. Children are not well-educated in many public school systems. During the pandemic, teachers unions were given far too much power. They demanded all sorts of special concessions that had nothing to do with the pandemic. They went on strike in some cities for higher wages and more benefits though they were not in the classroom. Unions insisted that schools remain closed for far too long despite the scientific findings that children were the least likely to get COVID-19 and suffered the least from symptoms. The teachers unions were concerned about themselves above all, not the welfare of the children. School children may never recover from the damage done to them from the pandemic lockdowns, mask mandates, and online learning. If ever there was a time to abolish teachers unions and demand school choice, it is now.
Republican candidates running for president realize how important the Moms for Liberty organization is for families. Nikki Haley is doing a town hall with Moms for Liberty today in Manchester, New Hampshire. She and Tiffany Justice were interviewed on Fox and Friends this morning. Haley is a perfect fit for the Moms, as she is the only woman and mother in the candidate field.
In June, Moms for Liberty held a summit in Philadelphia and it was around the same time the SPLC list of extremist groups was released. Most of the Republican primary candidates came and delivered speeches to the attendees. The designation made by the SPLC may have worked to their advantage. There was plenty of media attention on the summit and there were protests outside the venue. It all certainly brought attention to the group. People came from across the country to attend, with more than 1,000 in attendance.
Parental rights are important and will be an important issue in 2024. Good for Moms for Liberty for standing up to the leftist bullies who try to silence them. They are over the target. The SPLC has outlived its original mission and usefulness. It is just another leftist organization working to eliminate conservatives and independents from the public square. Moms for Liberty is fighting the good fight and are happy warriors as they do so. More power to them.
