Buttinskie

 Know Thy Enemy. One of the leading groups banning books and going after the LGBTQ+ community is Moms for Liberty (I think that it is very ironic that these groups that want to oppress us have "Liberty" and "Freedom" in their names.).

Meet Moms for Liberty, the group leading LGBTQ book bans in Pa. schools
At least 27 Pa. counties in have active chapters of the group, which was founded in Florida in 2021
The Pennsylvania Capital-Star
By Gary L. Day
February 18, 2023


In the ongoing battle over school book bans in Pennsylvania and nationwide, one group is speaking with an outsized voice.

Founded in early 2021 in Florida, Moms for Liberty (M4L) has expanded since then and now has over 200 county chapters nationwide in 35 states. The organization currently claims over 200,000 members.

Originally focused on opposing mask mandates in schools during the COVID-19 pandemic, Moms for Liberty quickly expanded its agenda to oppose LGBT-positive policies in schools, LGBT-themed materials in school libraries, what they believe is critical race theory in curricula, and many other diversity-positive issues related to schools and students.

The organization has seen success in Pennsylvania, with chapters in at least 27 counties across the commonwealth.

Thanks to efforts by M4L and its Republican allies, Pennsylvania ranks third in the nation in the number of school library book bans. Between July 2021 and June 2022, the commonwealth saw 457 book bans across 11 school districts.

These buttinskies are trying to tell parents what to teach their children.

M4L tends to follow a predictable playbook. If a particular school board is not responsive to the organization’s demands, M4L mobilizes its membership to put forth a slate of right-wing candidates for the next election. According to Karen Smith, board member for the Central Bucks school district, that was exactly the strategy that gave M4L supporters a majority in Smith’s district. The result is that Central Bucks is undergoing a new round of efforts to ban a fresh list of LGBT-themed and racially inclusive books from the school library.

They want to stick their noses in our raising of our children.

In response to M4L’s expanding presence, organizations are springing up to push back against the conservative takeover of local school boards. These include: Parents for the Freedom to Learn, whose purpose is to mobilized progressive parents to oppose oppressive education policies and book bans; School Board Partners, which seeks to challenge the growing conservative presence on school boards; and Truth(Ed) advocates to protect students’ rights to an unencumbered education. All these organizations have a strong, vocal online presence, as they attempt to combat Moms for Liberty’s expansion.

Animosity against us is what is driving this. The Republicans want to keep their voting base angry and we have counter with our love of inclusion. We have to organize of all who are against this invasion of our rights.

The New York Times wrote in A Fast-Growing Network of Conservative Groups Is Fueling a Surge in Book Bans,

Traditionally, debates over what books are appropriate for school libraries have taken place between a concerned parent and a librarian or administrator, and resulted in a single title or a few books being re-evaluated, and either removed or returned to shelves.

But recently, the issue has been supercharged by a rapidly growing and increasingly influential constellation of conservative groups. The organizations frequently describe themselves as defending parental rights. Some are new and others are longstanding, but with a recent focus on books. Some work at the district and state level, others have national reach. And over the past two years or so, they have grown vastly more organized, interconnected, well funded — and effective.

The groups have pursued their goals by becoming heavily involved in local and state politics, where Republican efforts have largely outmatched liberal organizations in many states for years. They have created political action committees, funded campaigns, endorsed candidates and packed school boards, helping to fuel a surge in challenges to individual books and to drive changes in the rules governing what books are available to children.

The $64,000 question is their money coming from?

The 74 (The 74 is a nonprofit news organization covering America’s education system from early childhood through college and career.) had an article…

Moms for Liberty, one of the fastest-growing and most recognized conservative parent advocacy groups in the nation, paid $21,357 to a company owned by the husband of one of its founding members, campaign finance records show. 

The group doled out the money to Microtargeted Media, founded by Christian Ziegler, a current Sarasota County commissioner and vice chairman of the Florida GOP, in late August. 

Moms for Liberty was founded by three people, Tina Descovich, Tiffany Justice and Bridget Ziegler, Christian’s wife, who served as its director through February 2021. Bridget Ziegler joined the Sarasota County School Board in 2014 and was re-elected this summer. 

[...]

Almost all of the money donated to Moms for Liberty Florida came from a $50,000 donation from Publix heiress Julie Fancelli in late June and nearly half of it went to Microtargeted Media. The contribution from Fancelli, a prominent financial backer of the Jan. 6 rally that led to the attack on the Capitol, accounted for all but $837 of the cash raised by Moms for Liberty Florida. Almost all the rest of the committee’s funds went in $250 donations to dozens of politically aligned Florida school board candidates.

These pogroms against us are well funded and lead by right-wings conservatives. They are anti-LGBTQ and are trying spread their animosity toward us.

Even books without sexual content can be problematic if they include L.G.B.T.Q. characters, because they are “sexualizing children,” she said: “It is normalizing a lifestyle that is a sexual choice.”

“Those kinds of lifestyles,” she added, shouldn’t “be forced down the throats of families who don’t agree.”

It is seen by their words and deeds that they have a warp senses of beliefs that somehow being LGBTQ+ is a choice that we somehow make. They still believe that only chromosomes determines gender and being gay or lesbians is not inborn in us.

And it is not only us they are against but also… Blacks and other minorities.

Campbell called Moms for Liberty and another highly watched group, The 1776 Project Political Action Committee, which has raised $3 million to advocate for conservative school board candidates nationally this year, “a weird combination of single-issue organizing,” in this case around the topic of education, “and a fairly diffuse set of goals — either focused on a hot-topic issue that will fade quickly, like CRT [critical race theory] — or on goals that are too amorphous to actually be accomplished, like ‘patriotism.’’’ 

These are the far right-wing Republicans who want to tell you how to raise your children. These buttinskies, busybodies, meddler… no, no those words don’t describe them… words more like fascist, authoritarians, jingoistic fit them much better.

For them words like diversity, inclusion, cross-cultural, and multiracial are swear words and arouse anger.