The perpetual Klan cycle

Putting the DeSantis Moms in historical context:

White women did not have to be members of the WKKK to push for reactionary politics in schools during this period. In her book “Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy,” historian Elizabeth Gillespie McRae recounts how Mildred Lewis Rutherford, former historian general of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, argued that Northern textbooks were polluting the schools of the South. In 1919, Rutherford created criteria for evaluating both textbooks and teachers, calling for a loyalty test for school officials to ensure they understood the “true” history of the South.

These battles over schools would continue as the movement for Black civil rights gained traction after World War II, particularly with the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which declared racial segregation in schools to be unconstitutional. White women who had not been activists before became major players in the massive resistance to school desegregation — not just in the South, but across the US. As they battled desegregation, many White mothers argued that the Supreme Court had superseded local — and parental — authority. They sought to wrest back control by adopting segregationist textbooks, promoting private academies and, at times, shutting down public schools altogether while conducting private lessons at home.

And, as desegregation moved North, right-wing women again became central players in school politics. Louise Day Hicks, an activist who once ran for office, proclaiming herself “The only mother on the ballot,” founded Restore Our Alienated Rights (ROAR) in 1974 to resist school desegregation in Boston. Protest marches featured mothers pushing strollers as they called for more parental control over the local schools.

Race was not the only issue motivating right-wing mothers to organize. In 1977, Anita Bryant — a famous singer and mother of four — founded Save Our Children, an anti-gay organization that framed its opposition to gay rights as an effort to save children from sexual predation (an antecedent to today’s “groomer” slurs). Arguing that gay people “must recruit the youth of America” because they could not have children of their own, Bryant leveraged her own identity as a mother to make a moral case for stripping gay men and women of legal and civil rights. And she did: Her campaign to overturn anti-discrimination laws in Miami, Florida, successfully eliminated employment protections for gay workers. (It would take more than 20 years for Miami to reinstate its ban on discrimination based on sexual orientation.)

These mothers’ movements, from the WKKK, to massive resistance to Save Our Children, all relied on the image of mothers protecting children. But they were in service of a much larger political project: shoring up traditional hierarchies of race and sexuality. They were about motherhood and education, but as a means to an end. Moms for Liberty operates in precisely the same way, building on this century-long tradition. The book bans, the curricula battles, the efforts to fire teachers and disrupt school board meetings — little here is new.

The Anita Bryant example is particularly important, since as the anti-LGBTQ+ backlash within the Republican Party intensifies, some Savvy pundits are going to start dusting off the “everything would have been fine had the courts just stayed out of it” chestnut. It was bullshit then and it’s bullshit now.