NYC elected officials, teachers protest at right wing Moms for Liberty event

An event hosted by the controversial “parental rights” group Moms for Liberty drew close to a hundred protesters Thursday, who say the right-wing organization presses ideologies lawmakers and advocates described as hateful.

The town hall, moderated by co-founder of the national group Tiffany Justice, counted two elected school board members in Manhattan, Maud Maron and Charles Love, among its speakers. Their names and associations with the public school system were used to promote the event.

The panels were sold out, organizers said on social media earlier this week, though the crowd outside rivaled the size of the audience.

Elected officials, residents and teachers pushed the venue on the Upper East Side to cancel the event. When that failed, they organized to protest the group’s push into a Democratic stronghold.

“We know that Moms for Liberty are a bunch of hypocrites,” Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine said Thursday. “You don’t believe in liberty if you want to ban books.”

The Movement of Rank and File Educators, or MORE, a powerful caucus of the city’s teachers union, told protesters to show up with signs, noisemakers and donations for migrants at the Bohemian National Hall.

“What we are here to say to … Moms for Liberty is take your clown circus back to Florida,” said state Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal (D-Manhattan). “We don’t need you in New York City or New York State.”

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) weighed in ahead of the protest.

“Despite their catchy name,” Nadler posted earlier this month on social media, “Moms for Liberty is nothing more than an alt-right hate group vilifying the LGBTQ+ community.”

“There is no place for hatred or bigotry in New York, which is why I’m deeply troubled by their planned event on the Upper East Side. We cannot allow this fringe group to dictate what books are in our libraries or the version of our nation’s history that fits their preferred narrative,” he said.

Close to 850 people had signed onto an online petition against Moms for Liberty as of Thursday afternoon.

Inside, panelists for more than two hours panned the local public schools, blasted low reading and math state test scores and questioned the value of a high school diploma in New York. One of the presenters said, “There’s no such thing as a transgender child” to a clapping crowd.

Some accused the school system of being a jobs program for adults, rather than a place for students to learn — and said the state’s above-average investments in education would be better spent if it could follow families to their choice of charter, private and homeschools.

Speakers and attendees blasted a recent state law to lower class sizes if more inexperienced teachers need to be hired, and a literacy program in which performers dressed in drag read books to children.

To promote the event, Moms for Liberty seized on a Brooklyn high school that shifted to remote learning for one day last week, after migrant families living in a flood-prone emergency tent shelter at Floyd Bennett Field slept overnight on the floor of the school gym.

“School is closed tomorrow,” read one of several social media posts that referenced the closure. “This is one reason we will be discussing the state of education in NYC at our Townhall [sic].”

Other speakers included Wai Wah Chin, president of the Chinese American Council of Greater New York. That group on Wednesday sued the state education commissioner over a decades-old program to diversify college students in STEM. Natalya Murakhver, a contributor to the conservative New York Post who sued the city to reopen public schools during the pandemic, also spoke. In a recent column, she accused progressives of “shamelessly” trying to censor their discussion.

The night before the town hall, students, parents and elected officials — including Hoylman-Sigal and a representative for Comptroller Brad Lander — spoke out at a regularly scheduled meeting of Community Education Council District 2, including the Upper East Side and where Maron and Love serve as school board members.

A couple of members urged the board to vote on a statement separating it from Moms for Liberty, after Maron’s and Love’s affiliations with the council were promoted by the national organization. The president struck it down on procedural grounds.

At the Moms for Liberty event, Maron called one of the speakers at the school board meeting — a recent high school graduate who identified as queer — a “straight girl without a boyfriend.” Asked about it later, she doubled down that it was a quip, but “deeply” serious.

Maron, telling the Daily News she was speaking at the behest of Justice, whom she’s known and admired for several years, said she was not a part of any Moms for Liberty chapter or intended to start one.

“I am an elected parent leader in the NYCPS [New York City Public School] parent leader system, and I contribute in that manner,” said Maron, who in 2022 lost a congressional bid in the Democratic primary to Rep. Dan Goldman. Maron is also the co-founder of the local group Parent Leaders for Accelerated Curriculum and Education, or PLACE, but stepped down as co-president in October.

The city’s conflicts of interest code allows school board members to use their titles so long as they give a disclaimer on written materials and verbally that they are not speaking on behalf of the Community Education Council, but in their personal capacity. Education officials told The News they followed up with members Thursday to remind them of the rule.

Mona Davids, another speaker, told The News her focus was students behind on grade-level literacy skills and school safety, and blasted lawmakers for not advocating for those issues instead.

“Where are they? Why don’t they go and protest that?” Davids said.

On Sunday, the Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association announced it would proceed with the town hall over the strong objections of local lawmakers. President Joseph Balaz said he will match profits from the event with his own funds and donate the proceeds to a nonprofit for “young, future leaders.”

“Based on strong and thorough advice from our counsel, we concluded that we are not in any position to break the contract,” Balaz said in a statement.

“We are a completely apolitical organization concentrating on cultural performances,” the statement continued. “This particular group clearly does not fit our strong nonpolitical stance. Be aware that BBLA is neither organizing, hosting, nor supporting this specific rental event. Furthermore, as a first-generation immigrant who years ago escaped a dictatorship and absolute censorship, I am personally very sensitive to concepts like book banning, thought and expression controls, and so on, which this highly politically charged turmoil around this event brings out.”

A chapter of Moms for Liberty launched last year in Queens. It had fewer than two dozen members at last count in the fall, according to a tally in the nonprofit national education source The 74.