LancasterOnline Editorial Board: Guard against the extremism of Moms for Liberty in your school district
The editorial board of LancasterOnline has some concerns about Moms for Liberty. They also have an alternative.
It’s mid-July, so we imagine the last things you want to think about right now are the 2024 presidential campaign and school board politics.
But it’s been reported that members of Moms for Liberty are planning to ramp up their influence in both of those arenas. Your best hope of countering that influence is at the local level — at meetings of your local school board and in November’s local elections — so you should formulate a strategy of your own.
Take a page out of Showalter’s book.
As she wrote last Sunday, “a group of us grandmas here in Lititz are getting together regularly out of concern for our schools, students and teachers in the Warwick School District who are under attack from parents who share the Moms for Liberty philosophy.”
Showalter and company call themselves Grandmas for Love, choosing to emphasize love over Moms for Liberty’s skewed version of freedom.
It’s freedom only for those who embrace Moms for Liberty’s extremist views — not for LGBTQ+ students and their parents, or families of color, and certainly not for educators who seek to teach the complete and truthful history of our nation, or for school librarians who champion students’ right to read diverse and challenging books.
Moms for Liberty cloaks its agenda in flowery language about parental rights, maternal love, the U.S. Constitution and stoking “the fires of liberty.” Founded in 2021 by three Florida mothers who found an audience for their angry rhetoric denouncing school mask mandates, the organization recently was labeled an antigovernment group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
In the Warwick School District, as LNP | LancasterOnline’s Brett Sholtis reported in March, teachers have been vilified as “groomers” — a term associated with child sexual abuse — and the school board has been asked to produce proof that Warwick educators aren’t teaching Marxism.