Moms for Liberty. Seems like such a nice organization. Who would not want liberty? Most of us have wonderful stories about our moms. Who would not want moms vouching and advocating for their children? Moms and liberty. Moms for Liberty. What a great combination.
Or is it? Moms for Liberty is an organization, of not only mothers, that has had a powerful presence across the United States and has been key to the continued dismantling of education—especially the humanities and social sciences. The organization states clearly that they want to “Fan the flames of liberty in your community.” They fan the flames of violence and yet stay quiet on violence against a large segment of children.
On their website, they state that “power belongs to the people” and that “we fight for our children.” Rather, they encourage attacks on education, marginalization, and silence to protect a certain child. Only a certain child. Through the last decade, they have gained visibility alongside the MAGA movement. Moms for Liberty has become the voice of MAGA conservatism, especially on the educational terrain. They have stressed that parents have not been given the opportunity to protect and “properly” educate their children. Thus, the organization centers the power of parents and wants to lessen what they see as governmental intrusion. Yet, they have entered the political realm to seek greater governmental intrusion in education and in our children’s lives. They have become the grassroots organizers for MAGA politics.
Their call to action is to protect their children. Parents’ love for their children and desire to protect their children are commendable acts. Yet, what are they protecting their children from? It is not from morally bankrupt leaders like Matt Gaetz, Donald Trump, or Bill Clinton, nor from the National Rifle Association (NRA), which stays silent on the increased mass shootings in schools. Rather, they want to protect their children, especially with regards to education and the “danger” of education. Yet, this danger of education is not based on education and scientific evidence; rather, it is deeply couched in propaganda.
With their mission, Moms for Liberty actively organized across the nation to shut down pathways to education because they see certain books and forms of knowledge as a threat to their children. What is their social background? How might they conceptualize the practice of protecting children? When you look at their website, you see that key members of the organization and board members are white, Christian, heterosexual, financially stable women—they resemble elements of the “mythical norm” described by Audre Lorde in 1984. Thus, what we have are white women fighting to protect white, Christian, heterosexual children. Through their activism and organizing, they situate themselves as the gatekeepers of education and devalue the expertise and labor of well-trained librarians and teachers in order to remove various texts from school libraries and curricula.
What are these books that Moms for Liberty are fighting to remove? Books dealing with the lives of gay, lesbian, queer, and trans communities. Books addressing histories of racial violence in the United States. Moms for Liberty justified and advocated for the removal of these books on the premise that these books on LGBTQI life were grooming their straight kids to be gay. The premise is that straight kids live in such precarity and are in danger in a world where there is so much pressure to be queer, gay, trans, and lesbian. Such a premise intentionally omits the histories of brutal violence against LGBTQI communities and LGBTQI youth. The danger has not historically or in the present moment been about LGBTQI books or LGBTQI kids. Rather, it is the sheer violence that LGBTQI children have encountered in many of their families, in schools, in sports, and from their straight peers. For example, the young man Matthew Shepard was kidnapped, brutalized, tortured, and killed by straight young white men.
As scholars and activists have shown, the precarity of LGBTQI lives does not show up in shows such as Will and Grace and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Instead of straight kids being groomed, we have seen on the other hand how individuals, health organizations, and the government have brutalized queer children and queer adults. Until at least the 1970s, gayness was seen as a medical pathology and had to be corrected physically and psychologically. For example, inhumane shock therapy was one procedure used to “straighten” kids. For those kids who were intersex, they had surgeries and forced gender socialization to integrate them within the heterosexual, cisgendered matrix.[1] These were and continue to be gruesome physical assaults on children. Our children. Your children. Furthermore, in the current moment, we have seen various states, such as Tennessee, implement a ban on essential, life-giving gender-affirming medical care. These important stories about children do not surface when there talk about “protecting our children.”
Moms for Liberty as well as MAGA politicians frequently cite the psychological violence inflected upon straight kids through books addressing diverse sexual orientations. However, there is a suffocating, deafening silence about larger issues of psychological violence and mental health. There is a gruesome reality that Moms for Liberty do not seem to care to address. Rates of suicide are high among LGBTQI youth. So many young LGBTQI people, without resources and without support systems, take their own lives. These are painful deaths. We should all care about these deaths. LGBTQI deaths deep reach into my soul. So much suffering and pain that they have seen taking their own lives as the only option. This shows how much we continue to fail our young people and our children. Many young LGBTQI people die by suicide annually. They feel marginalized, some have been thrown out of their homes, and there are not always easy sources of support.
The policing of books does not allow a chance for them to see people like them and see possibilities for life free of anxiety, depression, and violence. Additionally, by banning these books, it does not give straight children an opportunity to see the diversity in sexual orientation and gender performance in their own families and in their own communities. It does not allow them to understand diversity of experiences. These banned books would give straight children the tools, empathy, and care to build community with their LGBTQI peers. Children want to support and care for other children.
Similarly, Moms for Liberty, in their ferocious drive to ban LGBTQI books, have also sought to ban books that address the histories of racism and histories of non-white communities in the US. The MAGAish assumption here is that any reference to racism and its historical impact on non-white communities causes severe harm and poor psychological health for white children (do not forget that the American Psychological Association has never said this). Such a logic falls into the into the same logic of “reverse racism” whereby those benefitting from white advantage are the ones being most negatively impacted and violated. No structural analysis of power and no historical evidence supports this. For one, Moms for Liberty has not mentioned, as Dr. Rich Milner has brilliantly demonstrated, the cases of police officers and school officials treating brutally Black children or the high rates of detention and suspension for Black children.[2] Similarly, this organization does not see how educational facilities, like Freedom Schools during the Civil Rights Movement, were vital for Black children and all children in understanding history in the broadest sense and gaining tools for transformative leadership.[3] In the process, banning books addressing Black Studies, Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies, Latinx Studies, and Indigenous Studies would deprive children, both white and non-white, of understanding the historical and contemporary manifestation of racism and settler colonialism:
- It is a refusal to address the horrible violence done to Black children through slavery, rape of Black girls by white men/white masters, and the brutal killing of children such as Emmett Till and Tamir Rice.
- It is a refusal to engage with the histories of abusive child labor of Latinx children, the recent caging of Latinx children in cages along the US-Mexico border, and difficulties Latinx children face in our systems of education.[4]
- It is a refusal to address the ways that Indigenous children have faced violence at reservation hospitals and in Indian Boarding schools across the US and Canada.[5] This includes cases of rape, forced assimilation, and death.
- It is a refusal to understand the ways Asian American children faced racism in early 1900s US with Chinese Exclusion acts,[6] during the 1980s with the growth of Japanese global power and the killing of Vincent Chin, after the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks, and during the COVID-19 pandemic.[7]
- It is a refusal to provide spaces of sporting pleasure for trans children.[8] Sport becomes available for only cisgendered children.
What do all these refusals tell us? The book bans and attacks on education have never been about children. It is definitely not about all children. Moms for Liberty are not about children, but rather fanning political anxieties and securing greater power for their own adult powerbase. If they cared about children at all, Moms for Liberty would be working to secure the rights, freedoms, and lives of all children. Moms for Liberty are missing when over 18,000 Palestinian children have been killed in Gaza. Moms for Liberty are missing when Sudanese children are dying during trying times. Moms for Liberty are missing when children are dying from increased school shootings. I guess books are more dangerous than guns. Moms for Liberty are present in the public forum to speak on behalf of children, but without any research, evidence, or empathy.
All of our children have lives. Complex, multifaceted lives. Our children live in difficult times. They need a full assortment of resources more than ever. Moms for Liberty offer a liberty with carelessness and fearmongering. These are people, who in the name of protecting their children, have become monsters preying on all children. Monsters against children’s dignity and liberty. Monsters against life. Monsters against children.
We must work, we must demand, and we must act to give resources to our children so that they can build happier and more supportive worlds than those we have built. We have to listen to children to co-create livable worlds. Power to children! We have to support all of our children so that their leadership present bright, wonderful futures.
Stanley Thangaraj is a socio-cultural Anthropologist and author of Desi Hoop Dreams (New York University Press, 2015).
[1] Rubin, David A. Intersex matters: Biomedical embodiment, gender regulation, and transnational activism. Suny Press, 2017.
Rubin, David A. ““An unnamed blank that craved a name”: A genealogy of intersex as gender.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 37, no. 4 (2012): 883-908.
[2] Milner IV, H. Richard. “Why are students of color (still) punished more severely and frequently than white students?.” Urban Education 48, no. 4 (2013): 483-489.
[3] Hale, Jon N. The freedom schools: Student activists in the Mississippi civil rights movement. Columbia University Press, 2016.
[4] Taylor, Lawrence, and Maeve Hickey. Tunnel kids. University of Arizona Press, 2001.
Marrun, Norma A., and Marcela Rodriguez-Campo. “Entre la casa y la calle: Latinx childhood re-memories of space and place.” Children’s Geographies 21, no. 2 (2023): 306-320.
[5] Gilbert, Matthew Sakiestewa. Education beyond the mesas: Hopi students at Sherman Institute, 1902-1929. U of Nebraska Press, 2010.
[6] Chin, Ava. Mott Street: A Chinese American family’s story of exclusion and homecoming. Penguin, 2024.
[7] Endo, Rachel. “Diversity, equity, and inclusion for some but not all: LGBQ Asian American youth experiences at an urban public high school.” Multicultural Education Review 13, no. 1 (2021): 25-42.
[8] Travers, Ann, Jennifer Marchbank, Nadine Boulay, Sharalyn Jordan, and Kathleen Reed. “Talking back: Trans youth and resilience in action.” Journal of LGBT Youth 19, no. 1 (2022): 1-30.