Who Is Moms for Liberty?

And why is their propaganda driving MCS School Board decisions?

Now that we know for certain a Moms for Liberty banned book list was used as the starting point for Marietta City Schools Board of Education’s Fall 2023 book bans, we should explore who these moms are, exactly.

The short answer is Moms for Liberty is a right-wing group bent on remaking public schools in their own image. A product of the pandemic and backlash to mask mandates and other public health measures including vaccines, Moms for Liberty rose up in Florida in early 2021 to fight mask mandates and vaccine requirements in public schools. As pandemic health measures lifted, they refocused their energy on removing books they didn’t like from public school libraries and packing local school boards with their supporters.

Last year, the Southern Poverty Law Center designated Moms for Liberty an extremist organization due to their targeting of marginalized groups like the LGBT community, their opposition to teaching concepts around race and diversity, equity, and inclusion, and their close ties to other extremist organizations like the Proud Boys, Three Percenters, and QAnon. Former national leader of the Proud boys, Enrique Tarrio, who was sentenced to 22 years in prison for seditious conspiracy in the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol, referred to Moms for Liberty as “the gestapo with vaginas.”

According to The Hill:

Here are six reasons why Moms for Liberty is an extremist organization:

1. Featured speakers at the “Joyful Warriors Summit” included Katharine Gorka, an anti-Muslim activist, who has advocated “shutting down radical mosques” in the U.S.; North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, who believes teaching children about sexual orientation and gender identity is child abuse, homosexuality is “filth” and the transgender rights movement is “demonic” and “full of the Antichrist spirit”; and KrisAnne Hall, who compared the U.S. Capitol police to Nazi SS troops and claims the government of the United States “has no authority outside the PERMISSION of the sheriff” and “is just as much of a federal power as France or Texas within your state.”

2. Prominent members of Moms for Liberty have close ties to the Proud Boys, Three Percenters, QAnon and white Christian nationalists. Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio once boasted that Moms for Liberty is “the gestapo with vaginas.”

3. The front cover of “The Parent Brigade,” the newsletter of the Hamilton County, Ind., chapter of Moms for Liberty, recently carried a quote from Adolf Hitler: “He alone, who OWNS the youth, gains the future.” At a media training session at last week’s summit, Christian Ziegler, chair of Florida’s Republican Party (and [Moms for Liberty Founder] Bridget Ziegler’s husband), questioned the decision of chapter leaders to apologize: “The media is not your friend … Never apologize. Apologizing makes you weak.”

4. [Moms for Liberty founder] Tiffany Justice’s confrontations with teachers were “so disruptive and disrespectful,” administrators threatened to bar her from the school. The chair of the Monroe County, Pa., chapter of Moms for Liberty was arrested for harassment; the head of communications for the Lenoke County, Ark., chapter allegedly threatened librarians with gun violence; a restraining order was issued to the chair of the Livingston County, Mich., chapter after she reportedly told school board members, “We’re coming after you. Take it as a threat. Call the FBI. I don’t care.”

5. The chair of the El Paso County, Colo., chapter raised the hypothetical of a teacher telling a tomboy, “it might be time to transition. Let’s go talk to the school therapist. Let’s go talk to a physician. Let’s do this.” She believes “teachers, unions and the president” are engaged in a coordinated effort to make children trans and gay to “break down the family unit, conservative values,” and “slowly erode constitutional rights.” However, she does not know of anyone who transitioned because of social pressure.

6. The Williamson County, Tenn., chapter of Moms for Liberty alleged a book about Martin Luther King Jr. and the March on Washington promotes “anti-American, anti-White, anti-Mexican” instruction, singling out a photo of segregated water fountains and an image of firefighters hosing down Black children. The chapter also demanded the removal of “The Story of Ruby Bridges,” about a six-year old who integrated a school in Louisiana in 1960.

Moms for Liberty claims to be a “parent’s rights” organization, but their advocacy across the country, particularly in Florida, tells a different story. Their book ban lists disproportionately target books with LGBT characters and themes and with LGBT and POC authors. They insist books that have been on school library shelves for decades are “pornography,” “obscene,” and “harmful to minors.” Many are books that are considered classics and important in preparing high school students for college like The Color Purple, The Bluest Eye, The Handmaid’s Tale, and many others. They and their supporters call school librarians “groomers” just for having books with mature content on the shelves of their libraries.

Marietta in the Middle wrote earlier about The Politicization of School Libraries and the chaos that comes with it. Arkansas tried to criminalize providing books with mature content to minors threatening librarians and booksellers with misdemeanor charges, but a judge has prevented that law from going into effect while library groups appeal it. A Moms for Liberty member in Santa Rosa County, Florida tried to send the police to investigate a school librarian, and in Massachusetts, a police officer searched a teacher’s classroom looking for the book, Gender Queer, after an unidentified person told police it contained pornography.

Georgia has jumped on the “parent’s rights” bandwagon to a lesser degree, but one that bears watching. In 2022, the legislature passed HB 1178 “Parents’ Bill of Rights” and HB 1084 “Divisive Concepts Law.” That same year, they also passed SB 226, which addressed book banning procedures in Georgia. There have been rumblings about additions to these laws in the upcoming 2024 session that Marietta in the Middle will be keeping an eye on and keeping you informed about.

The Moms for Liberty organization has grown rapidly nationwide claiming as many as 120,000 members across the country. There are six Georgia chapters in Fulton, Gwinnett, Hall, Oconee, Laurens, and Chatooga counties, but none in Cobb County. That doesn’t mean their influence hasn’t been felt in the Cobb County School District and Marietta City Schools.

In September, the Marietta City Schools Board of Education banned the books Flamer and Me and Earl and the Dying Girl after Libs of TikTok started a kerfuffle in the Cobb County School District. That issue spilled over into MCS after a reporter from the Marietta Daily Journal started asking school board members about it. The Board then passed a Directive to the Superintendent compelling him to remove all content from school district libraries vaguely defined as “sexually explicit” over the objections of parents, teachers, students, and community members. Architects of the MCS book bans, Jaillene Hunter, Jason Waters, and Angela Orange, repeated Moms for Liberty propaganda to the local media, calling books in the Marietta High School library “pornographic” and “obscene.” Information obtained via open records requests shows Hunter coaching fellow board members on how to speak to reporters about the books they were banning. “Define what we are talking about,” she texts, “Pornography or highly sexually explicit materials — not the classics. Could not broadcast what I’m referring to on your very own station.” We’ve seen board members follow her advice over and over and over again claiming that books deemed age-appropriate for high school aged students by organizations like Common Sense Media, Kirkus Review, School Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly are “pornographic” and “obscene.”

As we’ve discussed before, many of the “classics” the BOE protected from being banned, like Atlas Shrugged and The Color Purple, are much more sexually explicit than many of the books they removed, so their stated concerns that students be protected from “sexually explicit content” ring false. Either “sexually explicit content” is harmful to students, or it isn’t. It shouldn’t matter whether a book has been declared a “classic” or not.

More concerning than the BOE’s Moms for Liberty rhetoric, the initial list of books to be pulled for review was created using Moms for Liberty book ban lists. An email obtained through open records requests states, “A committee has been convened (in house committee) to read books identified through the Moms of [sic] Liberty organization frequently challenged. There were 43 books on this list, MHS has 28.” With the initial list coming from an avowed anti-LGBT organization, it’s no surprise a majority of the books targeted for removal were books with LGBT themes or characters. The MHS library has 100 books in its LGBT section—just .5 percent of all 20,000 books in the library’s collection—but LGBT books made up half the books banned via the September Directive.

The good news about Moms for Liberty is the movement appears to be on the decline. Seeing closer scrutiny of their ties to extremist fellow travelers and reeling from a scandal involving founder Bridget Ziegler, her husband, and a woman accusing him of rape, the organization has taken a hit to its credibility. (Click the link for the salacious details; this is a family publication.) Politically, seventy percent of Moms for Liberty endorsed school board candidates lost their elections in November. Some local chapters are reevaluating their relationship with the national organization after all the hubbub.

The group that has wreaked such havoc in public schools in Florida and across the nation is hopefully finding their influence on the wane. The book banning efforts of the MCS School Board was a wakeup call to the Marietta community that Moms for Liberty’s influence was making inroads in our own school district. Community members are rightly concerned. The fact that some MCS school board members’ talking points about the book bans were closely connected to Moms for Liberty rhetoric and that the book bans themselves were a product of the group’s banned book lists calls into question the entire rationale for banning the 25 books removed as a result of the Directive and reveals what a discriminatory process it was from the beginning.

MCS School Board members need to remember who their constituents are and listen to the parents, teachers, students, and community members who live in Marietta instead of outside groups who don’t have our students’ or our school district’s best interests at heart.