Moms for Liberty co-founders Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich were in the hot seat in a "60 Minutes" interview that aired Sunday.60 Minutes/CBS
Since its founding in 2021, the conservative organization Moms for Liberty has billed itself as a champion for “parents’ rights,” pushing campaigns across the country to ban books and the use of pronouns in schools. Their crusade, as my colleague Kiera Butler has reported, often alleges that educators, specifically in public education, are out to “groom” and “indoctrinate” kids.
But what, exactly, does that mean? It doesn’t appear as though Moms for Liberty knows either.
In an interview with 60 Minutes host Scott Pelley that aired on Sunday night, the group’s two co-founders repeatedly struggled to explain their platform beyond empty talking points that have fueled the culture war in schools. They also failed to present facts to back up various claims.
“Parents send their kids to school to be educated, not indoctrinated into ideology,” co-founder Tiffany Justice told Pelley at one point.
“What ideology are they being indoctrinated into?” Pelley asked.
Scott Pelley asks the founders of a conservative group calling for book banning: “What ideology are the children being indoctrinated into? What is your fear?” https://t.co/6dUGXXacjT pic.twitter.com/mE7YiO1gfk
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) March 4, 2024
“Let’s just say, children in America cannot read,” co-founder Tina Descovich responded, referencing the group’s effort to sharpen its focus on literacy issues, before Pelley’s voiceover narration interrupted to note that the co-founders “often dodged questions with talking points.”
“You’re being evasive,” Pelley shot back.
Eventually, Justice seemed to realize he wasn’t going to let her get away with a non-answer and attempted to get specific. “They’re looking at these books where sexual discussions are happening with their children at younger and younger ages,” she said further in the conversation.
But as Pelley noted in a voiceover, Moms for Liberty’s fixation on books—often written by, or focused on, LGBTQ people and people of color—is a misguided interpretation of what has actually happened on the ground: claiming intentional malice when books that contain discussions of sex and are meant for high school students are mistakenly made available to younger students. The group also frequently takes the contents of books out of context, with the help of a website called BookLooks.org, which allows people to challenge books in schools without actually reading them and by assigning them a rating based on content it deems “objectionable.” (The site claims it’s not affiliated with Moms for Liberty and that it doesn’t support banning books.)
During their interview with 60 Minutes, the co-founders also dodged Pelley’s questions about what, exactly, they mean when they allege teachers are librarians are “grooming” kids.
“Parents want to partner with their children’s schools, but we do not co-parent with the government,” Justice said.
“Grooming does not seem like a word that you want to take on,” Pelley said, once again pushing back on the non-answer.
"What do you mean by that?” Scott Pelley asks Moms for Liberty founders about claims, posted on the group’s social media, that students are being “groomed” by teachers and librarians. https://t.co/aZk0Imib73 pic.twitter.com/zxiuKnA5gz
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) March 4, 2024
The co-founders also emphatically denied critics’ allegations that they have an anti-gay agenda.
“We have gay members,” Justice said. “I think it’s an effort to really try to marginalize us as an organization because parents are coming together—across racial lines, across religious lines, across all of these different ways that we see Americans being divided so often.”
But the group’s ethos does not, in fact, reflect the majority of Americans’ viewpoints. The majority of voters in all political parties—71 percent overall—reject efforts to ban books, according to the American Library Association, which also found that about three-quarters of parents trust their local libraries “to make good decisions about what books to include in their collections” and believe that individual parents don’t have the right to decide which books other peoples’ kids can read.
After the interview aired, Moms for Liberty predictably alleged that producers had edited the interview in a biased way.
