Moms for Liberty have had a rough year. They’re still RNC darlings. – LGBTQ Nation
by Curated July 21, 2024 · Gay News / Gay Pride / Gay Rights / LGBTQ Nation
Author: Keira Butler
This article first appeared on Mother Jones. It has been republished with the publication’s permission.In its marketing, Moms for Liberty comes off as a group of like-minded people, mostly women, who all happened to come together because of a shared concern for children. Founders Tiffany Justice and Tina Deskovich, the website says, are just a couple of “moms on a mission to stoke the fires of liberty.” But as I’ve previously reported, the organization’s connections to the Republican party run deep. Its conferences have been sponsored by the GOP training group the Leadership Institute and the conservative powerhouse think tank the Heritage Foundation. Earlier this week, after the RNC Heritage Foundation event, Moms for Liberty national director Catalina Stubbe told me that her group is “very close friends” with Heritage, which was one of the sponsors of today’s event, and whose president Kevin Roberts spoke on one of the panels.She believed schools “are being oversaturated by national agendas…They’re having CNN in the classroom,” she said. “They’re pushing national topics such as the transgender topics, sexualized content.”—————
Monica Kepes serves as the secretary of a Moms for Liberty chapter in Washington County, Wisconsin. “I think the big bureaucratic institutions are instituting a lot of stuff that comes down through the education system,” she said. “I think the bigger you get, the more power there is, the more chance corruption and all that kind of stuff.” At Moms for Liberty’s upcoming 2024 summit, which will take place next month in Washington, DC, it seems unlikely that the group will be able to muster a repeat performance of the star-studded speaker roster from last year. So far, this year’s list appears to be a grab bag of not especially famous ultra-conservative pundits, C-list comedians, and culture warriors. One reason for this lackluster lineup could be the fallout from a series of scandals in 2023. A group from a chapter in Kentucky posedfor a photo with the white nationalist group the Proud Boys. (Those members were later removed from the group.) Last year, a chapter leader in Indiana quoted Hitler in a newsletter. On the last evening of the annual summit a few months later, Justice, the co-founder, said in a speech, “One of our moms in a newsletter quotes Hitler…I stand with that mom!” But the most damaging setbackcame in late 2023, when Christian Ziegler, chair of the Florida GOP, was accused of raping and illegally filming a woman who had been involved in a sexual relationship with him and his wife, Bridget Ziegler, a founding member of Moms for Liberty. As I wrote at the time, the situation was especially awkward because Ziegler helped craft Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” parents’ rights law, which forbids teachers in the state from talking about same-sex relationships. “The irony is crazy because you have this woman and her husband who are so concerned with preventing children from hearing anything that doesn’t totally align with their values,” one Florida mom told me at the time. “And then it’s like, I’m having to explain a three-way to a 12-year-old this week.” (Christian Ziegler has been cleared of rape charges; in March, the Florida state attorney’s office declined to criminally charge him for illegally filming the sexual encounter because of insufficient evidence.) Unsurprisingly, no one mentioned the sex scandal (or any of the other ones) at the town hall event. But on one panel, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis took a victory lap about a bill Ziegler helped to create. “It used to be…you didn’t have to worry about your kid going to kindergarten and being told that they should change their gender,” he said. “We put the kibosh on that in Florida—we said, ‘We are not going to be indulging in things like gender ideology in our schools.’” The crowd whooped with approval. The Republican Party seems to agree. Its official platform, released last week, calls for funding cuts for schools that embrace “woke” policies like LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum. This serves as a reminder that even though Moms for Liberty’s star appears to have dimmed over the past year, the reverberations from its movement will be felt for years to come. Moms for Liberty, cofounder Tina Descovich told the crowd, “is here to fight, fight, fight, and win, win, win.” She paused. “And winning we are.” Don’t forget to share: Actual Story on LGBTQ Nation
Author: Keira Butler
