The Southern Poverty Law Center on Tuesday labeled several parents’ rights organizations “hate and antigovernment groups” alongside groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.
The extremism watchdog’s “Year In Hate and Extremism 2022” report counts 1225 “hate and antigovernment extremist groups” being present in the US last year, up from 733 in 2021, with several of the new additions focusing on parental rights and education issues.
“Schools, especially, have been on the receiving end of ramped-up and coordinated hard-right attacks, frequently through the guise of ‘parents’ rights’ groups,” the SPLC’s report argues.
“These groups were, in part, spurred by the right-wing backlash to COVID-19 public safety measures in schools,” the report adds. “But they have grown into an anti-student inclusion movement that targets any inclusive curriculum that contains discussions of race, discrimination and LGBTQ identities.”
The SPLC report hones in on Florida-based group Moms for Liberty – a nonprofit with 280 chapters in 45 states and 115,000 members – as one of the organizations “at the forefront of this mobilization.”
“They can be spotted at school board meetings across the country wearing shirts and carrying signs that declare, ‘We do NOT CO-PARENT with the GOVERNMENT,’” the SPLC writes about Moms for Liberty, designating it an “extremist group.”
“The group hijacks meetings, preventing officials and parents from conducting their normal proceedings,” the report adds, claiming that the organization’s activities “make it clear that the group’s primary goals are to fuel right-wing hysteria and to make the world a less comfortable or safe place for certain students – primarily those who are Black, LGBTQ or who come from LGBTQ families.”
Other education-centric groups added to SPLC’s “hate map” in the report include No Left Turn in Education, Parental Rights in Education, and Parents Involved in Education.
SPLC’s President and CEO Margaret Huang said in a press release Tuesday that the report is “exposing a concerted effort by hate groups and extremist actors to terrorize communities and gain control of public institutions by any means necessary.”
These groups are descending on Main Street America and disrupting people’s daily lives, too often with dire consequences for communities of color, Jewish people, and the LGBTQ+ community,” she added.
In response to the report, Moms for Liberty co-founders Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich released a statement on Tuesday arguing that their group is “devoted to empowering parents to be a part of their child’s public school education,” calling it their “fundamental goal.”
“Name-calling parents who want to be a part of their child’s education as ‘hate groups’ or ‘bigoted’ just further exposes what this battle is all about: Who fundamentally gets to decide what is taught to our kids in school – parents or government employees? We believe that parental rights do not stop at the classroom door and no amount of hate from groups like this is going to stop that,” Justice and Descovich said.