These moms are ill-mannered miscreants for the cause:
The three-dozen women who showed up at the Brevard County school board meeting last week wore identical “Moms for Liberty” T-shirts, declaring they don’t “CO-PARENT with the GOVERNMENT.”
They snickered and jeered their way through a board member’s defense of the district’s classroom mask mandate, eventually getting kicked out of the room.
What a great example for their children. Act like a snotty, juvenile bully at official meetings. I’m sure their kids’ future employers will be very impressed:
Afterward, a gaggle huddled under an oak tree nearby, listening to the proceedings via cellphone. When the board voted to keep the mask ordinance in place, Jody Hand, a 52-year-old mother of three, jumped to her feet. “I am going to be spending every minute making sure parents know they don’t have control over their children anymore,” she shouted.
Hand’s anger offers a window into Moms for Liberty, a controversial organization looking to play a major role in next year’s elections. Launched initially in Brevard County to support “parental rights” in public schools, Moms for Liberty chapters have spread nationwide. Its leaders hope to convert brawlish pandemic-era cultural divisions into lasting political power.
The organization is channeling a powerful frustration among conservative mothers, who feel increasingly sidelined by school administrators and teachers. And their targets are sprawling — not only mask mandates but also curriculums that touch on LGTBQ rights, race and discrimination, and even the way schools define a scientific fact.
A Moms for Liberty chapter in Tennessee questioned whether a textbook that included a photograph of two sea horses mating was too risque for elementary schools. Members in Suffolk County, N.Y., have begun describing school mask policies as “segregation,” urging their children to rip off their masks in classrooms in protest.
That’s great. Teach your kids to create chaos in the classroom.
And in Indian River County, Fla., a chapter recently objected to fourth-graders being taught how to spell “spinal tap,” “isolation” and “quarantine” because they were too “scary of words” to teach at that grade level, said Jennifer Pippin, head of the Indian River chapter.
Right. Parents know best. Educators are kind of like their servants just there to “teach” whatever claptrap these ignorant fools tell them to teach. I guess these teachers are actually just babysitters.
In 10 months, Moms for Liberty has grown to 135 chapters in 35 states, with 56,000 members and supporters, according to the organization’s founders. The group hopes to one day have chapters in all 3,143 counties or equivalents in the United States.
“Now is the time to capture these parents for the long-term,” said Tina Descovich, a co-founder of Moms for Liberty. “If you miss this opportunity, when they are really engaged [during the pandemic], it’s going to be hard to engage them in the future.”
But the group’s critics warn that Moms for Liberty has sowed divisions among parents and made it harder for school officials to educate students while keeping them safe.
Gary Shiffrin, head of the Brevard Association of School Administrators, who has been involved in public education since 1971, blames Moms for Liberty for the most disruptive educational environment he has seen, besides the lingering opposition to desegregation early in his career.
“They have decided they are going to be the spokespeople for conservatism, and this won’t end when covid ends,” said Shiffrin, a former teacher and high school principal.
It won’t end with COVID. It’s just beginning.
Taking over school boards isn’t new. The old conservative movement used to do that too. But this is a national campaign . Even Steve Bannon is in on it.
Frankly, I don’t know why they just don’t pull their kids out of school and homeschool them. But that was back when they were sincere in their lunacy. Today, these groups are cynical extremists banding together to own the libs any way they can. And they’re using their kids — and everyone else’s — as pawns. In the end, if they can succeed in destroying the public schools due to lack of teachers and administrators willing to put up with this boatload of shit, it’s all good.