PHILADELPHIA, June 30 (Reuters) - Moms for Liberty, a conservative parents-rights advocacy group that has rapidly expanded since its founding little more than two years ago, flexed its political muscles on Friday as top rivals for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination addressed its national conference in Philadelphia.
"2024 is going to be the year when the parents across this country finally fight back," said Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, the closest challenger to front-runner Donald Trump, told the hotel ballroom crowd.
Trump, the former president, was expected to speak later in the day.
Their appearance, along with other three candidates including former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, serves as a testament to the weight their campaigns are placing on race and gender-based cultural issues related to education heading into next year’s nominating contests.
Those culture war issues have animated parts of the Republican base, and the Republican rivals are hoping to appeal to parents of school-age children, particularly suburban women, an important voting bloc in U.S. presidential elections.
DeSantis talked up his record on education, telling the crowd how as governor he backed legislation expanding the state's private-school voucher program. He also defended removing books with sexuality and gender identity themes from public school shelves in Florida.
"To use U.S. tax dollars to bring that type of garbage into our schools is fundamentally wrong and has no place," he said.
In her remarks, Haley decried the participation of trans girls in school sports, calling it "one of the biggest women's issues of our time."
"They are literally trying to erase all the progress we have made," she told the women in the crowd.
Outside the hotel, some 300 people from liberal advocacy groups were protesting the event.
Before Friday's program, activists from Agenda PAC, an LGBTQ advocacy group, left hangers on doors of hotel rooms that read, "Please Disturb. Fascism in Progress."
Launched in 2021 at the height of the pandemic, Moms for Liberty increasingly has played an active role in helping to elect conservative members of local school boards, while also lobbying state legislatures for measures such as Florida’s law that prohibits the teaching of gender-identity concepts to elementary and middle-school students.
The Republican candidates' courting of the group's members signifies its arrival as a major conservative player in national politics. Its summit is being sponsored by longtime right-wing policy shops such as the Heritage Foundation and the Leadership Institute, which trains candidates for office.
Tina Descovich, a Florida-based co-founder of the group, said the organization will not endorse a Republican candidate in the primary, but instead insist that candidates pledge to support its agenda of advancing policies that increase "parental involvement" and "defend against government overreach."
“The candidates know that the No. 1 issue domestically right now is the attack on parental rights and the educational failure in our country,” Descovich said.
COURTING MOMS
No presidential candidate has worked harder to align himself with the group than DeSantis, who has made limiting transgender rights and railing against progressive education policies central to his campaign.
Volunteers sporting shirts with the group’s logo could be seen working recently at DeSantis’ presidential campaign events in Iowa.
Kerry Gillespie, 46, who said she had been battling what she termed overreaching school policies in her Maryland neighborhood, said at the event on Friday that she is supporting DeSantis in the primary.
“The person has to go beyond lip service and have a track record where you can see their accomplishments,” Gillespie said.
Other Republican candidates also are cozying up to Moms for Liberty, which now claims 120,000 members in 44 states.
Tim Scott, a U.S. senator from South Carolina, recently sponsored a fundraiser for the group in his home state. In May, Mike Pence, the vice president under Trump, was bracketed by members of the group as he railed against an Iowa school district’s “gender transition” plan.
Haley publicly defended the group after the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups, labeled Moms for Liberty an “anti-government extremist” organization.
Members of the group have also shown up at Trump’s rallies, bearing their signature shirts.
Critics of Moms for Liberty, including national civil-rights groups, said its focus has moved beyond pandemic-related learning issues toward embracing an anti-LGBTQ and anti-diversity agenda that has brought about measures in several states restricting what can be taught in schools and books they term objectionable being pulled from library shelves.
“This is not about ideology,” said Jazmyn Henderson, a transgender woman with the advocacy group ACT UP. “We are talking about trying to wipe a community of people out of existence, about trying to force us back into the shadows.”
Tia Bess, Moms for Liberty's national director of engagement and a Black woman, pushed back against criticism that the organization is a hate group.
“Do I look like a racist to y’all?” Bess said. “It’s time to stop the division and stand up for our kids.
