Once again the conservatives don’t check the facts,Middle-Schoolers Tell Moms for Liberty to Stop Bullying LGBTQ+ Youth
Middle school students in Seattle sent handmade cards to respond to the anti-LGBTQ+ group. But Moms for Liberty claims this shows the schools are "indoctrinating and weaponizing" students.
The Advocate
By Trudy Ring
November 28 2023Students in the Seattle Public Schools have clapped back at Moms for Liberty, sending the far-right group handmade cards bearing pro-LGBTQ+ messages.
Moms for Liberty, which campaigns against LGBTQ+ content in schools, supposedly in the name of parental rights, shared several images of the cards Saturday on its X (formerly Twitter) feed. One reads, “LGBTQ+ rights are human rights.” Another says, “Gay is slay, stop being a rat.” Another says, “My heart when people are homophobic,” with an image of a broken heart in rainbow colors. Most of the cards use the colors of the rainbow.
Moms for Liberty did not approve, to say the least. In the tweet showing the cards, the group wrote, “Seattle Public Schools are spending class time indoctrinating and weaponizing your children. The building of the Red Guard in America.”
A Seattle Public Schools spokesperson said that creating and sending the cards was “an independent activity and not part of the school curriculum.” The cards were sent last spring.
And this is the part that blew my gasket…
The spokesperson’s comment went to Crisis in the Classroom, a project of the right-wing Sinclair Broadcast Group. Sinclair “owns, operates and/or provides services to 185 television stations in 86 markets” across the country, according to its website. Seventy-three stations carry the Crisis in the Classroom reports, and most of the coverage of the Seattle cards has been through Crisis in the Classroom, so it’s been largely negative.
The website Pride notes that,
Moms for Liberty, which has been labeled an extremist group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, was initially formed in 2021 to oppose COVID-19 restrictions in Florida schools but has since grown to have 250 chapters across the US and now works to ban books, get conservative elected to school boards, and attempts to end the “woke indoctrination” of children by stopping discussion of race, gender, and sexuality in the classroom.
[…]
Moms for Liberty members are spending all of this time and energy demonizing queer for “indoctrinating” children when they should have been keeping a better eye on their own leadership. A recent investigation by the Philadelphia Inquirer found that the Moms for Liberty had hired a convicted child sex offender as an outreach leader in Philadelphia. Phillip Fisher Jr. is a Republican pastor who pleaded guilty to a charge of aggravated sexual abuse of a 14-year-old boy in 2012.
Them wrote that…
If Moms for Liberty wasn’t so busy trying to keep kids from reading, they would have taken the time to note that the note they received alongside the letters was signed by the coordinator of a Seattle middle school’s GSA, not a classroom overtaken by the “woke agenda.”
When it comes to banning books our local school librarian created a display of the books in our school library that are on a "banned" list. The kids were horrified and expressed none of them wanted adults to tell them what not to read. All of the "banned" books are age and content appropriate for students.
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