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My first thought is that there is absolute no tension or conflict between the Moms for Liberty position that parents should substantially control what schools teach and having leadership that is permissive with underage drinking and group sex. Contra the position that MfL is a group of lunatic right-wingers, I think they are actually sincere in their position that parents should be determining values rather than schools. Despite the snarky "family views indeed" from columnist Scott Maxwell, it is actually entirely possible to promote family values while having a personally kinky sex life or thinking it's fine for teens to play beer pong. If we weren't so deep into red-blue bullshit, pretty much everyone I know on the Blue Tribe side of things would think this is fine.
On your last point, I looked up the people involved, and... wow. Christian Ziegler is a rather dumpy fellow. Christian's wife, Bridget, is absolutely beautiful, particularly for a woman in her 40s. I don't know if this was supposed to be a hit piece, but the screencaps of her making faces at a board meeting sums it up. But now you tell me that not only does the portly fellow have a stunning wife, he was apparently regularly finding threesomes with her? I swear, if this whole thing was flipped around, the Blue Tribe would just be making fun of the Red Tribe for being jealous of Christian's life.
This feels like such a stretch.
The central innovation of the Florida school curriculum lockdown controversy was the right starting to call anyone on the left who tried to help trans teens or teach anyone that gay people are a thing that exists 'groomers'.
Furnishing minors with alcohol and/or drugs so that you can lure them to your house and have drunken parties with them is quintessential actual grooming behavior, like, it's literally what actual groomers do to actual minors to actually statutorily rape them.
Which, I'm not saying that full sequence of events necessarily happened here, but come on. If your side is going to make the entire argument center on who is or isn't a groomer, 'my boyfriend and I throw drunken parties every week for local minors where we get wasted with them and get in psychical scuffles with them' cannot possibly be spun as a good look.
It says "Moms for Liberty" right on the tin -- I do think that the confusion is related to a misapplication of the (artificial) Red/Blue team dichotomy. If it were "Moms for Jesus" or something I could buy some hypocrisy-based attack, but she seems to be living well within her moral framework here?
And yet, most of their advocacy revolves around banning books and curricula discussing LGBT, trans and civil rights issues:
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So painting them as being about Liberty in any meaningful sense of the word, other than Liberty being a red-tribe codeword, seems patently dishonest. Their objections to content are often explicitly political and coded red-tribe. Some of the shit that was banned in Florida schools a few years ago was hilariously inoffensive.
As for the OP, whatever. I don't really care. But if people bothered to look at the context, I'd expect most to at least get a chuckle out of the fact that people clutching their pearls at the idea of their child being exposed to the idea that gay people exist then get schwasted with them on the weekend in between threesomes.
I agree that it's a bit ironic, but I wouldn't go so far as to say dishonest. In context I'd defend it as 'freedom not to have one's children indoctrinated into the state religion' -- school is mandatory and funded by all sides of the political spectrum after all. I don't think it's unreasonable to demand a neutral curriculum -- although they seem a bit nutty and I'm sure that I wouldn't want to defend their specific choices of books that should not be taught in school. (much less whatever straw version of them that the D.B. has cooked up)
Indeed; mask mandates are also pro-liberty as they give people the freedom to not worry about getting COVID in the train. Censorship gives LGBT and minorities freedom from hate speech. Jailing Donald Trump will give us freedom from fascism and neo-nazism.
Censorship is inherently illiberal however you try and dress it up. That doesn't make it bad. There's such an aversion to censorship that when we actually decide we want to engage in it we have to lie to ourselves and dress it up as some freedom or another.
Better argument for the curriculum. Bad argument for book bans. Nobody is forcing your child to look at those books any more than anyone was forcing the other high school kids to go to that party.
Whew. Good luck with that one, man.
I take freedom of speech pretty seriously. I'm tired of people trying to dilute it into describing the process through which state runs schools decide how to apportion the limited space they have in school libraries and school curriculum. No one is banning books, that's a false framing. People are saying they don't want the state to use their tax money to buy books to make available in buildings their tax money spent constructing for the purpose of indoctrinating their children. If I write or love a book I have zero right for the state to put that book in public schools and I don't have any idea where the belief I might have such a right comes from.
The exact right process to decide which books go in such a building is the local government and that precisely the process these people are lobbying. How else could it possibly be?
You don't seem to be engaging with Chrispratt's initial point about the dishonesty of the org name. If the 'freedom not to have one's children indoctrinated into the state religion' is liberty, then anything can be liberty. Can you name an example of a political issue that cannot be framed as liberty in this way? I agree with you that determining curriculum is not anti-liberty. I disagree that it is honest to call it pro-liberty.
I'm more narrowly addressing calling the removal of books censorship. To answer your question I recognize the word game being played. There are positive and negative liberties that live under the same umbrella. welfare is framed as liberty maximizing because it frees the recipient of needing to earn those resources and thus opening up their options. I think this form of positive liberty is something worth considering and in many cases pursuing. But it has little to do with negative liberty which is fundamentally about being unconstrained. Between the two types of liberty you can indeed probably describe nearly all policy, where you constrain you do so to benefit others which is their positive liberty and where you do not constrain you are doing so in furtherance of negative liberty so the only type of policy that could do neither would be one that constrains to no benefit which would be a strange policy indeed.
Because of this reasoning I'm pretty much indifferent to naming a party that isn't particularly constraining after liberty, and on balance I think the "moms of liberty" group falls closer on the side of negative liberty. After all they're just asking for the state to use their resources in a way slightly more aligned with their interests so they aren't clearly constraining anyone besides maybe state employees.
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