advocates against school curriculums that mention LGBT rights, race and ethnicity, critical race theory, and discrimination, while multiple chapters have also campaigned to ban books that address gender and sexuality from school libraries. The group has also campaigned for LGBT students to be kept separated from straight and cisgender students. The group began by campaigning against COVID-19 protections in schools, including mask and vaccine mandates.
Well isn’t that special? These moms really care about kids, don’t they?
Claiming to be more religiously righteous than others while ignoring real problems in our society and more worrisome violations of one’s faith can best be summed up as selective righteousness. The Moms for Liberty, like many politicians and talking heads on the right, are righteous about the things they fear, about pointing to people who are different than they are as inferior when they are under no threat whatsoever. Meanwhile, when real threats arise, they easily look the other way and ignore the very same teachings they claim as their moral compass.
I’d like to point out all the hypocrisies inherent in these double standards, but I wasn’t planning on a blog post of Tolstoyesque breadth. Let’s focus on the two main ones here: 1) protecting kids and 2) COVID protections. Both issues represent an astonishing level of ignoring real threats while cherry-picking non-threats and stoking divisions.
Let’s start with “protecting kids.” If these moms use any type of filter on their email or social media, I suspect one phrase they filter out is “school shootings.” The number one cause of death among children in the United States is firearms. How about getting as worked up over stopping a real problem instead of using your religion to make up problems like educating children about historically marginalized groups? I’m sure (based on the politicians they support) the Moms for Liberty is entirely pro-gun, so they’ve lost me on righteousness when they clearly love turning plowshares into swords.
Teaching kids about the LGBTQ+ community, Black History, and people who are different than you hasn’t killed anyone, but the hate instilled by people like the Moms for Liberty continues to threaten trans people, who suffer from a year-over-year rise in violence committed against them. The MFL has no credibility to talk about protecting anyone other than themselves.
This may seem like the highest form of hypocrisy when mentioning our kids, but it’s in a close race with the dialogue around COVID protections.
Throughout the pandemic and now that it is mostly behind us, the anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers have proclaimed that they have a right to refuse vaccines and masking because it is their body, and government shouldn’t be telling them what to do with their bodies.
Hah.
I have a kid on the autism spectrum, so I have been listening to anti-vaccine nonsense for a long time, but fighting protections for COVID is a whole new level of quackery. We can isolate the hypocritical elements of anti-COVID protections by comparing them to similar stances of being anti-choice, anti-LGBTQ+, and anti-gun control in this handy table.
| Hypocritical Element | Women’s Choice | Gay Rights | COVID and Vaccine Protections | Gun Control |
| “It’s my body, and government can’t tell me what to do with it!” | “Oh yes they can!” | “We’ve got to stop other people from doing things with their bodies!” | “Right on!” | “Your body is yours, but people with mental health issues and no gun licenses can take it away at any time.” |
| “There are consequences to these activities!” | Other families’ and people’s lives are impacted, not yours. | Go left one cell. | Everyone’s family around you is impacted. Other kids at your kid’s school can die if your kid isn’t vaccinated against measles, let alone COVID. | The biggest cause of death among kids just grows bigger, but by all means blame our problems on LGBTQ education. |
| “It goes against my values!” | Being able to take care of a kid after it’s born apparently isn’t a value. | Jesus didn’t say anything about being gay, but he did condemn people who use their righteousness to oppress others. | Go right one cell. | Isn’t saving lives a value we can all agree on? |
It’s so easy to cherry-pick religious dogma for people like the MFL. Meanwhile, the Judeo-Christian religion commands of a few things that they seem to overlook.
| Commandment | Excuse |
| Thou shalt not commit adultery | Unless you’re the last Republican president. |
| Thou shalt have no other gods before you | Except for the gods of mammon and self-righteousness. Also, move one cell up. |
| Thou shalt not steal | Top secret national security documents are perfectly okay—take all you want! (Two cells up.) |
| Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor | “The election was rigged!” (Three cells up.) |
Yes, I’m sure the MFLs (if they were reading) would bring up “Thou shalt not kill” to defend their anti-choice stances, but leaving aside questions of the unborn vs. the born, in many cases these holier-than-thou-ers seem willing to let women die to save the life of the unborn. Also, guns kill more children than anything else, and children unvaccinated against measles and rubella can be silent killers. This type of killing can be ignored while letting kids hear that there are gay people in the world or that the U.S. used to have slavery goes against their values.
Selective righteousness usually presents itself as anger and blame. Someone else is to blame for the problems in our society, while actual problems that need us pulling together remain to be solved. Dividing people and blaming people isn’t, from what I’ve observed, preached by any religion, but it is preached by people who twist their religions. Maybe this is why many on the left are quick to compare American Evangelicals to the Taliban. They both want to push their values and religion into everyone’s lives, classrooms, and governments in a way that threatens both religion and democracy.
Our religions teach us about empathy, welcoming the stranger, helping the poor, and not looking the other way when you see injustice. These are values we need to pour more energy into. I don’t see any of them coming from the MFL or other anti-woke groups and politicians. They are an empathy-free zone, and they are turning their values into an angry god who wields thunderbolts at real people, real Americans, whom they disagree with. Their hypocrisy needs to be pointed out at every turn. I can’t think of anything that goes against our collective faiths, our democracy, and the concept of liberty more than pointing at other people and saying you’re better and they can’t be recognized, taught about, or be who they want to be.
