Moms for Liberty, an unknown group 4 years ago, flexes its influence at the RNC
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Moms for Liberty didn’t exist during the last presidential race. But at this year’s Republican National Convention, members of the parental rights group flocked to Milwaukee as delegates, guests and town hall hosts.
They see the group as a rising force in the Republican Party.
“Four years ago, I couldn't have told you who the governor of Wisconsin was and here I am as a delegate at the Republican National Convention,” said Moms for Liberty Ozaukee County Vice Chair Amber Schroeder. “It's going to be the women that get somebody elected next.”
Throughout RNC week in Milwaukee, parental rights activists laid out lofty goals for the Trump administration: abolishing the federal Department of Education, rolling back Title IX expansions and curbing gender-affirming care.
“Parental rights is the biggest issue that needs to be safeguarded in the next presidential administration,” said co-founder Tiffany Justice, who founded Moms for Liberty in Florida with former school board members Tina Descovich and Bridget Ziegler.
Moms for Liberty did not provide estimates on how many of its members were present at the RNC, but at least five Wisconsin delegates attending an event Tuesday were part of the group. Four years after its founding, Moms for Liberty has 130,000 members and 300 chapters across 48 states.
They demonstrated influence within the GOP when Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Congressman Byron Donalds, Sen. Ron Johnson and Vivek Ramaswamy joined them on stage for a town hall during RNC
“People, frankly, want the government to leave them alone,” Sanders said to courses of “yes!” and cheers in the audience.
“They want government out of their schools out of their homes, out of their business out of their community.”
Moms for Liberty’s rise within the Republican Party
Since its founding during the height of the pandemic in 2021, Moms for Liberty has become a central player in the polarizing conservation over how race, gender and sexuality should be taught in school. Its fight to ban books and remove lessons on race and gender attracted harsh criticism from civil rights groups. It has been designated as an extremist organization by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
More: What groups have sought book bans in Wisconsin schools? Here are four to know.
After more than half of the 500 school board candidates Moms for Liberty endorsed won school board races in 2022 — 76% of whom were first-time candidates — GOP leaders took notice.
That effect was reflected in statewide races that centered parental rights in their campaigns, most notably the 2021 election success of Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who mobilized suburban voters around COVID-19 restrictions, critical race theory and transgender policies in schools.
After his victory speech, Youngkin thanked “mama bears” for their help. U.S. Rep. Jim Banks, R-Indiana said the win showed “that Republicans can and must become the party of parents.”
That influence is evident in the updated Republican Party platform, in which parental rights was mentioned four times. Terms like CRT, gender indoctrination and universal school choice were also added.
“I don't think in 2016 we really quite knew where we were as a country and whether people understood what fundamental parental rights were,” Justice said, crediting COVID-19 for launching the issue into the spotlight.
Suburban women hold powerful votes in battleground states like Michigan and Wisconsin, and women make up a key part of the Democratic Party’s voter base. Polling shows suburban women are more likely to identify as pro-choice and cast a majority of their votes for Biden in 2020.
Even as Republicans struggle with division on abortion, they see parental rights as an issue that can unify the party — and make inroads with suburban women.
“It's not as polarizing a topic as abortion is, so this is something people can rally around and really get behind,” Schroeder said. “The conservative GOP candidates are realizing that they need us to keep their elections going and that this movement is growing bigger and bigger and bigger, and they want to take advantage of that.”
Moms for Liberty wants to avoid 'sacrificing children at the altar of progressivism'
Florida, the state that gave rise to Moms for Liberty’s home base, provides a test model for policies the group would like enacted on a federal level.
DeSantis during his term as governor enacted sweeping educational changes, from a "Parental Rights in Education" bill that curbed classroom discussion on gender identity — dubbed "Don't Say Gay" by critics — and sexual orientation to his Stop WOKE Act that restricted lessons and training on diversity. He approved massive school voucher expansion, banned gender-affirming care for minors and overhauled the progressive practices of New College.
Critics of the DeSantis measures decried them as hurtful for LGBTQ children and confusing for educators.
“It used to be that you would send your kid to school and they would learn math and science and stuff, and maybe not everything was perfect, but you didn’t have to worry about your kid going into kindergarten and being told that they should change their gender,” DeSantis said during the RNC. “We put the kibosh on that in Florida.”
That call was echoed throughout the week in Milwaukee. Panelists during the Heritage Foundation’s policy fest on Monday admonished teachers unions and called for a stop to “indoctrination of children” and “degradation of American culture.”
Heritage Foundation Senior Legal Fellow Sarah Parshall Perry said the first thing she’d like to see Trump do in office is revoke “all guidance” from Biden’s executive action that expanded federal anti-discrimination statutes. She'd like to see the protections for transgender individuals removed, as well as the Title IX expansions that added a new recognition of LGBTQ+ athletes.
“From that first pebble, we see an avalanche of gender identity and orthodoxy in every system in America,” Perry said of the executive order. “That is the primary responsibility I think of the next administration is to make sure that they don't sacrifice children on the altar of woke progressivism.”
LGBTQ+ experts say the Biden administration’s expansion of LGBTQ+ protections and gender-affirming care has helped combat harassment and discrimination. A report last year from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said transgender youth are more likely than their peers to experience poor mental health from bullying, exclusion and a lack of support from adults than their peers.
More: Young people are hurting, but they're also learning healthy coping strategies
Asked about the rights of parents to transgender children, Justice said there’s “no such thing” as a transgender child and called gender-affirming care “abuse.” She compared a child wanting gender-affirming surgery to her son telling her he wants to be a pirate and would like a doctor to poke his eye out.
Of the 1.6 million transgender people in the United States, nearly 1 in 5 are ages 13-17.
Biden-Harris Principal Deputy Campaign Manager Quentin Fulks said calls to roll back protections "pose a grave risk.”
“We're not going to vilify young adults who are going through experiences in their lives or just being who they are,” Fulks said. “It's not something that we stand for on the Democratic side.”
That Moms for Liberty partnered with the Heritage Foundation isn’t a surprise. Its 922-page policy blueprint, Project 2025, calls to eliminate the federal Department of Education, remove trans women from sports, and ban “critical race theory” and “gender ideology” from “curricula in every public school in the country.”
Justice said the department serves “no purpose right now except to force toxic ideology into our schools.”
The federal Department of Education establishes policy, programs and federal assistance for education. One of its significant roles is to enact policies on federal financial aid and how that is distributed.
Notably absent during an RNC panel discussion this week was discussion of banning books or critical race theory, topics that have repeatedly gotten the group in hot water. There was also no mention of former co-founder Ziegler's involvement in a sex scandal that pushed her husband, the chairman of the Florida Republican Party, out of office. Nor of their subpar performance during 2023 school board races, when fewer than one-third of school board candidates with the group’s endorsement won election.
The group's unified fight ahead reflects its broader aims within the GOP as it seeks to move beyond school board races into positions of higher office and implement policy in their state legislatures.
"We're running for Assembly, we're going to run for Senate," said Moms for Liberty Ozaukee County Chair Scarlett Johnson. "It's not just school board now."
As much as Moms for Liberty needs Republicans in that fight, they say the GOP needs them more.
"They're not chasing us," Johnson said. "It is that we are getting involved and working together mutually."
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Moms for Liberty flexes its influence on school issues at RNC
