Over the weekend, “60 Minutes” aired a piece on Moms for Liberty, the conservative “watchdog” group that has inspired absurd book bans across the country. Two of the founders of the group, Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich, sat for an interview with reporter Scott Pelley and had a difficult time answering pretty simple and direct questions.

“We love teachers. My children have had the best teachers. I've had the greatest teachers that have influenced and impact me. But there are rogue teachers in America's classrooms right now,” Descovich told Pelley. Justice added, “Parents send their children to school to be educated, not indoctrinated into ideology.”

Pelley asked, “What ideology are they being indoctrinated into?” Whether something short-circuited inside Descovich’s brain is hard to say, but after taking a breath and swallowing, she slowly answered, “Let’s just say … children in America cannot read.” Huh? 

Pelley repeatedly pointed out that the two were being “evasive,” and when Justice attempted to pivot to a handful of books with sexual content that may be inappropriate for certain age groups, his report was quick to point out that “Most people wouldn't want them in a lower school. But in a tactic of outrage politics, Moms for Liberty takes a kernel of truth and concludes: These examples are not rare mistakes, but a plot to sexualize children.”

There’s a reason these women don’t want to give clear answers to questions about their real positions on education: They aren’t popular opinions among most Americans. The midterm elections bore that out when the overwhelming majority of the group’s endorsed candidates failed to win school board races across the country.

The report touched on missing co-founder Bridget Ziegler (who left the group) and the ongoing (and very un-Christian-conservative-like) sex scandal involving herself, her husband, and another woman. But Ziegler and her moral hypocrisy were clearly not a topic cleared to be discussed at length by Pelley with the Moms for Liberty ladies.

The two women also denied theirs is an anti-LGBTQ+ organization—a position that the historical record does not support. They admit the group’s social media accounts are managed by Justice, but when pressed by Pelley on repeated social media posts attacking librarians and others for being “groomers,” a term that right-wing extremists use as a blaring horn of an anti-gay dog whistle, Justice’s nonsensical response was, “Parents want to to partner with their children's schools, but we do not co-parent with the government.”

Pelley pressed further, observing that “Grooming does not seem like a word that you want to take on?” Justice’s response was, “We did some polling” about “parental rights,” instead of owning up to her own inflammatory use of specific words.

The full segment focused on Beaufort, South Carolina, where two people’s complaints led to threats and a review of 97 books. Moms for Liberty, which is designated an “extremist” group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, is one of the main groups behind the so-called parental rights movement that manufactures rage about inappropriate literature being used in schools beset by “woke” ideology.

According to Pelley’s report, after a long, drawn-out process, only five of the 97 books ended up being banned (and it was discovered that one of the books being attacked had never appeared on a school shelf in the first place) while a few other books were moved up to middle school and high school libraries.

Enjoy the clear cowardice of two people who claim they want parents to have the right to choose what their children learn, but clearly want to control what  other people’s children should learn.

Republished with permission from Daily Kos.