Apart from pro-lifers, the anti-family Left hates nothing quite so fervently as parents who believe they should have more authority over their own children than the government does. And so the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) – a fear-mongering, corrupt, discredited but influential smear organization that demonizes mainstream conservatives as “hate groups” – has placed a dozen parental rights organizations on its “hate map” as “antigovernment extremist groups.”

According to the SPCA’s annual 2022 Year in Hate and Extremism report, the burgeoning, Florida-based Moms for Liberty organization was added to the Center’s hate list along with 11 other parental rights groups. These purportedly dangerous mothers now join 701 other “antigovernment” entities – as if “antigovernment” is an unreasonable stance to take in the wake of the totalitarian pandemic lockdowns, the weaponization of the FBI and the Department of Justice against the Obama and Biden administrations’ political enemies, the Department of Homeland Security’s abandonment of border security, and on and on. In light of the havoc the current regime is intentionally waging against the American people, it’s difficult to imagine how anyone could be pro-government.

The Southern Poverty Law Center is the same organization, by the way, that does not list the domestic terrorists of Antifa or Black Lives Matter among its so-called “hate groups.” It does, however, name Freedom Center founder David Horowitz among its “extremists” – indeed, the SPLC rather melodramatically calls him “the godfather of the modern anti-Muslim movement.” (As Horowitz himself has stated many times, neither he nor the Freedom Center is “anti-Muslim” but pro-freedom, which does put the Center proudly at odds not with all Muslims but with anti-democratic sharia law and with anti-Western jihadists. The “godfather” label is an amusing touch, painting Horowitz as some kind of Vito Corleone-style crime family patriarch).

Back to the demonization of parental rights groups. Categorized under “Locally driven right-wing mobilization” (because grass-roots community organizing is only acceptable when the Left does it, don’t ya know) the SPLC report reads, “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 claims. “Hard right,” by the way, is the SPLC’s favorite scare label for anyone to the Right of Lenin.

“These groups were, in part, spurred by the right-wing backlash to COVID-19 public safety measures in schools,” the report continued. This is partially true, but the lockdown backlash was not only “right-wing” and what the SPLC calls “public safety measures” were actually divisive, scientifically indefensible crackdowns on dissent that we all now know were not only ineffective but damaging to schoolchildren in many ways – not to mention the economic devastation wreaked by the government’s enforcement of business closures.

“But they have grown,” the SPLC intones ominously, “into an anti-student inclusion movement that targets any inclusive curriculum that contains discussions of race, discrimination and LGBTQ identities.”

This is a lie, of course. Parents do not object to “any” curriculum that contains those topics. What they object to is having the Left’s racist indoctrination and its satanic gender ideology foisted upon their children, often without the parents’ knowledge, by social justice activists acting under “the guise” (as the SPLC would put it) of educators.

In the report, the SPLC alerts its supporters that Moms for Liberty is at the “forefront of this mobilization,” which makes it sound like the moms are manning tanks and spearheading a blitzkrieg. “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 seems to think that this nonviolent, sensible slogan is threatening and radical. And in truth, it is threatening and radical to the Big Government left, which openly declares, as puppet President Joe Biden himself did several weeks ago, that America’s children “are all our children.”

The SPLC continues: “But Moms for Liberty 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 [sic], LGBTQ or who come from LGBTQ families.”

First, the SPLC adduces zero evidence that Moms for Liberty’s “primary goals” – or goals at any level – are to fuel hysteria and make “certain students” feel uncomfortable. Second, the SPLC doesn’t acknowledge that the gender confusion or racial division sown by leftist activists in the classroom is what actually makes “certain students” feel uncomfortable.

It went on to claim, “Their focused attack on critical race theory became a substitute for most things pertaining to Black history and culture.” The SPLC neglects here to explain that critical race theory is not black history and culture but a Marxist strategy for ramping up racial guilt and resentment, and for inculcating in schoolkids a false worldview which posits America as a systemically oppressive society. Nor does any of these parental groups object to the teaching of black history and culture. Their objections are to the teaching of ugly lies that America is racist in its very DNA (as former President Barack Obama himself put it), that black and other minority children are under the boot heel of a white supremacist society designed to keep them down, and that their white counterparts are inherently privileged by that very same system.

The report went on to huff that some chapters of parental rights groups “have attacked the book Gender Queer, a memoir about adolescence by a non-binary author, and others that explore sexuality and gender identity.” What everyone knows by now that the SPLC is omitting from this description is that those books are sexually explicit and often graphically illustrated depictions of children masturbating or having sex. The Left wants children exposed to this pornography against commonsense parental objections, because the Left is hell-bent on sexualizing children, period.

The SPLC also falsely accused “far-right activists” of “book banning” campaigns the Left claims have become “so charged and hate-filled that they have reportedly caused many librarians to leave their jobs, while others have been fired for refusing to take certain books off the shelves.”

First of all, conservatives are not attempting to ban a single book anywhere; book banning and stealth editing are weapons of today’s Left. Secondly,  librarians who refuse to remove sexually graphic books from the children’s shelves should quit their jobs or be fired, frankly. Common sense dictates that such material is grossly unsuitable for young readers until such age as their parents – not librarians or teachers or school board members – deem them appropriate, if ever.

“[The parental rights movement] is primarily aimed at not wanting to include our hard history, topics of racism, and a very strong push against teaching anything having to do with LGBTQ topics in schools,” SPLC Intelligence Project Director Susan Corke claimed. This is another lie, and Susan Corke and the SPLC know it. What conservative parents object to – and I know because I am one and I know many others – is the racist propaganda and the biologically incoherent gender subversion being aimed at the captive minds of children in the classroom.

Moms for Liberty was founded in January 2021 and is “dedicated to fighting for the survival of America by unifying, educating and empowering parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government,” according to its website. It has grown quickly to over 100,000 members and local chapters in 40 states, and has acquired a high enough profile that both former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis are slated to speak at its annual summit in Philadelphia at the end of this month. The organization “welcomes all that have a desire to stand up for parental rights at all levels of government” – and the SPLC calls that hate and extremism, because the Left seeks to crush anyone who will not bend the knee to the authority of the State.

Moms for Liberty co-founder Tina Descovich told Breitbart News that the SPLC’s smear of her group as a “far-right” and “antigovernment” movement that targets and intimidates teachers and school officials, advances “conspiracy propaganda,” and spreads “hateful imagery and rhetoric against the LGBTQ community,” was “a coordinated attack against the parents’ rights movement” and “we completely reject that accusation.” Her organization is “pushing back against the government overstepping its bounds into families… and that’s where the lines are being drawn in the sand today.”

Considering the past attack on the Family Research Council by a convicted domestic terrorist inspired by the SPLC, Descovich questioned why the FBI and the Justice Department are not more “concerned about an organization that is literally putting targets on the backs of everyday moms that are standing up for their children.”

Many prominent conservatives rightly leaped to the defense of parental rights group against the SPLC’s charge. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), for example, called the decision “absurd”: “Parents have every right to defend themselves and protect their children from liberal indoctrination in schools,” she tweeted.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) also called the accusation “[a]bsurd” and blasted the SPLC for caring more about “silencing parents who want to have a say in their children’s education than they care about a violent domestic terrorist among their own ranks.”

Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) wrote, “Insane to label moms who care about their kids’ well-being as ‘extremists.’… This is what the far left does to folks they disagree with, & it’s disgusting,” he wrote on Twitter.

The battlegrounds of school boards and school libraries are becoming the flashpoint of the Left’s war on the family, because parental rights groups are finally making a courageous stand. Parents – especially conservative Mama Bears – have put on the full armor of their righteous outrage to confront these ideological predators. The victor will determine whether future generations of children are raised in the Land of the Free or as drones of the State.

Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior.