Voters Tell 'Moms For Liberty' To Eat Shit
Time to put education back in the country's boards of education.
Americans like democracy a lot in principle, but they don’t always show up at the polls, especially for local and school board elections. In the last few years, that’s given rightwing groups a chance to capture school boards and local governments around the country by getting enough of their supporters to show up in low-turnout elections. And then they get to work banning books and rewriting curricula to save children from woke ideas like “slavery was bad.” The thing is, that seldom lasts outside heavily Republican areas, and sometimes even within them, because on the whole, far-right ideas just aren’t that popular. See yesterday’s elections in which abortion rights were a key issue; i.e., all of them, Katie.
Yesterday was particularly rough for candidates endorsed by “Moms for Liberty,” the White Christian Nationalist “parental rights” (for rightwing parents) group that wants to cleanse school libraries and curricula of books by/about LGBTQ+ people and people of color who aren’t Ben Carson or Thomas Sowell. Now that Americans are seeing what these loons want to do to public education, more and more communities are saying the hell with that.
Pennsylvania:
F’rinstance, in Pennsylvania, where the Mad Moms endorsed more than 50 candidates in 28 districts, the Moms had some wins here and there, with three Moms-endorsed candidates taking seats on the Nazareth Area School Board, and winning at least seven seats on several Cumberland County school boards. But in a couple of the Cumberland County races, Republican candidates said on their websites that they rejected endorsements by the Moms and related PACs; two of those candidates lost, and two won.
But elsewhere, Moms-backed candidates got stomped. Notably, voters in the Pennridge School District in Bucks County elected Democrats to all five open seats, taking the majority away from the rightwing majority that had previously won with Moms for Liberty support. While they held power, that crowd had a rightwing field day, as Forbes reports:
They had trouble telling creationism from science. They banned Banned Books Week. They tried to clamp down on student expression. And they removed DEI policies.
Pennridge’s conservative board also hired [consultant Jordan] Adams, with close ties to conservative Christian Hillsdale College, to scour through their curriculum and remove all things woke. This was a new business model, a proof of concept for retooling a school’s curriculum along more conservative lines. He was, he told the Moms for Liberty crowd, the “fox in the henhouse.”
The rejection of rightwing indoctrination continued in Central Bucks, where culture wars crap has been rampant. The Moms-endorsed majority pushed the banning of books on LGBTQ+ themes, banned Pride flags, and required teachers to “out” gay and trans students to their parents. One high school in the district tried to force a librarian to take down posters featuring a quote by Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel because it said “neutrality helps the oppressor,” and that was just too political for young folks to see (ultimately, the posters stayed).
Democrats won all five open seats in Central Bucks, taking the majority on the board.
Iowa:
In Iowa, Moms for Fascism lost big, too, as the Daily Beast details:
Linn-Mar district voters rejected three people endorsed by MfL, choosing instead to re-elect two incumbents and two newcomers for the board’s open seats. Laura Steffeck got just 11 percent support, while fellow MfL candidates Kevin Slaman and Tom Law each managed 10 percent.
Another Iowa MfL candidate, Greg Papin, failed to make it onto the Mount Vernon school board, while MfL-endorsed Barclay Woener and Richard David were unsuccessful in their races for the Cedar Rapids school board.
The group’s candidate for the West Des Moines school board, Teri Patrick, also didn’t make the cut with her 9 percent share of the vote. Patrick, who is listed as the Education Chair of the Moms for Liberty chapter in Polk County, in 2021 signed a letter asking for criminal charges to be brought against the school district for allegedly “disseminating pornography to our children” over the availability of two LGBTQ books in school libraries.
The two books, Maia Kobabe’s comics memoir Gender Queer and the George M. Johnson’s novel All Boys Aren’t Blue, are not porn, of course. (Those links give Wonkette a small commission.) There isn’t any goddamn pr0n in schools, yeesh, but the Mean Moms keep trying to sue school officials and even to jail school librarians.
Elsewhere in Iowa, voters rejected rightwing school board candidates in Johnston, installing a Democratic majority, huzzay.
And The Rest
That’s pretty much how school board races went all over: Moms-backed candidates lost in Minnesota and North Carolina, and in Loudoun County, Virginia, where there were near-riots at school board meetings over “critical race theory” and panic about trans kids in 2021, liberal candidates took a six-seat majority on the nine-seat board, pledging to put actual schooling and student progress over culture warring.
We bet that this is all somehow just terrible news for Joe Biden, the end.
[Daily Beast / Forbes / Philadelphia Inquirer / PennLive / HuffPost]
OT: Just applied for two chaplain jobs-one FT, one PT-at UCSD Health in San Diego. Tots and pears welcomed.
Where do they keep coming up with these candidates at the state and federal level? It's asked all the time
This is where. This is why the GOPer bench seems so deep and there's a neverending supply of loons to run.
They cut their teeth at school boards, town councils, minor elected seats. All those low level, part time, barely paid, unglamorous seats no one thinks about. Then they move up from there. The added bonus is most of those low level, local seats have far more impact on people's day to day than the president does so they get send the message out continuously evey day.
It a model we should have been following long ago, but it's good that we're noticing now. Start small and work up.