Conservative groups loudly condemned a Massachusetts police agency for citing the Southern Poverty Law Center in attacking the parental rights group Moms for Liberty in a law enforcement training.
Moms for Liberty called for a retraction, suggesting that the police agency actually went further than the SPLC in attacking the parental rights nonprofit.
The SPLC, which gained its reputation by suing Ku Klux Klan groups into bankruptcy in the 1980s, added Moms for Liberty to a “hate map” alongside Klan chapters in 2023. It branded the parental rights nonprofit an “anti-government extremist group,” but stopped short of calling it a “hate group.” Even so, the Massachusetts Municipal Police Training Committee included Moms for Liberty in a report on “Freedom and Hate: Speech, Crimes & Groups,” suggesting the organization is a “hate group.”
“The fact that the discredited SPLC listed Moms for Liberty as an ‘anti-government extremist group’ is bad enough,” Tina Descovich, CEO and co-founder of the parental rights group, told The Daily Signal in a statement Monday. “But to have the Massachusetts Municipal Police Training Committee echo this false claim and add to it that we’re a ‘Hate Group’ is beyond outrageous.”
“They need to immediately issue a public apology for incorrectly targeting moms and dads that advocate for parental rights,” Descovich added.
The Massachusetts Republican Party also condemned the training.
“Parents are right to seek a say in what their kids are being taught in public schools,” Massachusetts GOP Chair Amy Carnevale told The Daily Signal. “It’s disgraceful to see Moms for Liberty be classified as a hate group for exercising that right.”
The parental rights movement grew out of the COVID-19 pandemic, when schools remained closed and required students to wear face masks late into 2020 and 2021, and when remote learning allowed parents to see that schools had been teaching their children divisive gender and racial lessons. The SPLC and many teachers unions champion such lessons.
“While Gov. Maura Healey and the Massachusetts Teachers Union are busy stream-rolling our children’s educational futures to enact their far-left agendas, the MassGOP is focused on recruiting concerned parents to run as Republicans up and down the ballot in 2026,” Carnevale added.
Moms for Liberty is not the only conservative group on the SPLC “hate map” in Massachusetts. The Massachusetts Family Institute also appears on the map as an “anti-LGBTQ hate group.”
The institute condemned the police training.
“We are deeply disturbed that our state’s law enforcement officers are being trained to brand conservative organizations like Moms for Liberty as ‘hate groups,'” Sam Whiting, the institute’s general counsel, told The Daily Signal.
“The Southern Poverty Law Center has been discredited time and time again as a radical left-wing organization that weaponizes the language of ‘hate’ to disparage any group that disagrees with their politics,” Whiting added. “The Massachusetts Police Municipal Training Committee was negligent at best to use the SPLC as a source and should take immediate action to remove anti-conservative bias from its trainings.”
Critics on both the Right and the Left have accused the SPLC of exaggerating “hate” to demonize its opponents and raise money. Former SPLC staffer Bob Moser called the “hate” accusations a “highly profitable scam.” Former ACLU President Nadine Strossen dissented from the SPLC’s accusation that the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom is a “hate group.”
Critics have long called the SPLC “anti-Christian” because it puts conservative Christian groups on the “hate map,” claiming these groups demonize LGBTQ people. The SPLC long defended itself from such claims by noting that it did not put the conservative Christian organization Focus on the Family on the “hate map.” Yet earlier this year, the SPLC did just that.
Focus on the Family also condemned the Massachusetts police training.
“The SPLC is impetuously sloppy with their hate list which provides no useful information to anyone, save for the SPLC’s fund-raising efforts,” Glenn T. Stanton, director of global family formation studies at the Christian nonprofit, told The Daily Signal.
“The Massachusetts Municipal Police Training Committee shows their own poor sleuthing skills by giving it any credence,” he added. “Since the SPLC’s ‘hate list’ is so partisanly slanted against mainstream conservative organizations, it certainly does raise the question of what kind of justice good conservative citizens under their jurisdiction might expect.”
The Municipal Training Committee did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment by publication time, but a spokesperson stood by the training in a statement to GBH News.
The representative said the curriculum “draws on a broad range of open-source materials and activity happening across Massachusetts to expose officers to the perspectives they may encounter in the field while emphasizing respectful, unbiased engagement with all members of the public.”
The SPLC did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment, but an SPLC research analyst, speaking to GBH News, praised the training committee for including Moms for Liberty in the curriculum.