Moms for Liberty Meet Dr. Phil

Well, I suppose that was inevitable. Dr. Phil last month ran an episode about the parental rights debate. And there among the featured guests are Tina Descovich and Tiffany Justice, and while there was some appearance of balance, it tells you something about the episode that M4L's PR firm is sending out links to it with an invitation to interview the two leaders about it. 

The episode opens with Phil recapping the narrative favored by M4L--that covid came along and kids went on remote school and parents found out the terrible, awful things that schools were doing, and so a movement was born. That seems simple enough, but it's a markedly different narrative from the narrative that three experienced hard-right women with a communications background, one of whom is married to a GOP operative, decided to stir up some base voters (after two of them were ousted from school board seats by local voters) and tried on a couple of different issues before settling on naughty books, from which they hope to whip up some GOP electoral success.

Descovich and Justice get the first explaining spot, and then Phil turns to Nadine Smith, a community organizer and executive director of Equality for Florida, who, God bless her, does a lot of heavy lifting here. 

Much of the conversation is well-worn territory, but Descovich and Justice drop a couple of new ones into the mix that are worth noting, so I've watched this episode so that you don't have to. 

Seeing them in action is always a reminder that these are pros--they know their message, and like many on the far right, they are good at delivering a moderated version of it for mainstream consumption. You may want to be pissed off at them, but in front of a mainstream crowd they are not going to present like the cranky church ladies you imagine them to be. Here they absolutely agree that teachers worked so hard and did heroic duty during the pandemic and that teachers don't get fame and glory (though that nasty union...).  They'll get testier as we go (Descovich likes to wag her finger), but they mostly keep themselves under control. You would never guess that people who supported the Florida gag laws were called groomers and pedophiles by the governor's office.

Descovich and Justice insist they are not hostile toward LGBTQ folks, and I'm not sure that anyone in the studio believes them. Phil points out that there certainly does seem to be a thread running through the books they object to that would suggest they are anti-LGBTQ, and that's when we get one of their new talking points--and it's a peach:

Descovich :It's unfortunate that many LGBTQ books have so much sexual violence in them. That's an unfortunate thing that is happening. We're sorry that it is happening.

Smith smiles and notes "That is a new one" and Hannah Edwards, a school teacher and parent of a trans child pipes up to say that among the many books in her classroom that could get her in trouble, there is nothing with sexual violence. Which is super-obvious. But Descovich just pivots to the sex ed standards and argues that the national standards include a K-3 standard saying students should be aware that a person can be boy or a girl or neither or both. We're talking now about Florida's gag laws.  And here's where we get another new one

Phil: That wasn't being taught in the schools before fifth grade in Florida anyway, correct?

Descovich: But it is being taught now in New Jersey and all around the country in other states and so it was coming to Florida just like everywhere else and so this bill stopped that from--

Phil: This was a pre-emptive bill

Descovich: Correct

So it turns out that much of that talk about awful things that were happening in Florida and needed to be stopped was not actually true. 

Smith gets in a good talk about what the Don't Say Gay bill really does in terms of stifling speech and Justic jumps in to says that schools should not tell her child to be afraid to tell her something, and Smith's face speaks for all of us who are momentarily non-plussed by this angry rejoinder to something completely unrelated to what Smith was saying. And then we get some over-talking and an attempt to make nice with the parents of the trans child, who are not having it.

And then that gets squelched so that a law professor (Jody Armour, USC) with a truly epic fro can get us to look at what the law actually says. He correctly notes that the language is vague and that the law gives any parent the right to sue, which simply leads to administrators saying, "Just don't talk about any of that stuff ever."

Phil expresses his frustration about how schools don't teach students how to navigate life, stress, etc--he's talking about SEL, so I wonder if M4L will explain to him why that's bad. Not now anyway. Armour reiterates his explanation of chilling effect. Phil says "Didn't SCOTUS say parents are in charge years ago?" And everyone wants to get in here, but Armour gets to talk. 

Phil is now in Smith's face. What makes you think you know better? You can't give a kid a tylenol without calling parents. You can't make a presumption that the child isn't safe taking this home. She doesn't get an answer, because Dave Edwards steps in with the idea that children are who they are and adults won't change that, and we need to provide education that keeps them safe. Phil brings up suicide risk for trans kids and more talking erupts but--commercial!

Afterwards, there's a brief flurry in which Smith points out that M4L wants to take books from everyone and then Phil gets back to his question--why do you assume you know better--and Smith answers, "I don't." Here's a moment we can stop and note how Phil is framing the two sides; M4L are concerned moms, but Smith wants to tell keep parents uninformed because she thinks she knows best. 

Dave Edwards (the chyron now notes he's also a school admin) delivers a really nice talk about wanting students to be congruent, to be the same person everywhere, and how sharing information with parents is a critical part of that. Hannah points out that the missing piece is the child, that they could not get an education for their trans child at the original school because of adults and their concerns. She offers a clear description of how other parents rights were used to strip her of her own parental rights, which really is a critical point in this debate.

Candice Jackson is here; you may remember her as the DeVos Education Department's civil rights chief who famously observed that 90% of campus assaults claims are because both parties were drunk. She will now try to explain where the line should be drawn. On one side, it's okay to be anti-bullying and keep the child safe and educated, but on the other side is where the "belief system" of the child and their parents must be "validated and affirmatively proclaimed to be believed in" and it's a valuable point because I think these folks really think that's a distinction except that in practice time and time again it seems that anything other than staying quietly stuffed in the closet is seen as a demand to be validated and affirmed. She sees trans stuff as different because tolerance isn't enough--which, yes, and I don't know that she gets the implications here, but while you can just pretend that a gay or lesbian person is straight if they will cooperate by shutting up about it, you can't shove a transition in the closet and just keep treating them as their former gender.

Dave Edwards comes back with another good point-- home and school are different in that you can believe lots of terrible things at home, but you can't act them out in a public school where everyone is welcome (which may be one more reason that Justice has talked about overturning the whole system). 

The M4L crew says that school should focus just on facts, not on believes, which is quite the eight-year-old approach. 

Now Phil will move the goal posts and ask if schools are getting too political. Should the government just stay out of all this. 

After break, Rep. Joe Harding, a government person who has gotten involved in all this, will explain why government should get involved. He heard some shocking examples of schools holding closed door meetings without parents (not that he'll mention any of them), but parents totally wanted the state to step in. Also, calling it Don't Say Gay is just more fearmongering.

Smith gets to ask him a question, highlighting the chilling effects on her son's school (remove those rainbow stickers, removing books with LGBTQ families, warning stickers on books about race). Pretending that the bill doesn't mention gay so it's a neutral bill is disingenuous. He counters by saying that Smith's allies said parents should get out of schools, and opposed a bill to protect parents.

Smith: That bill did not protect me

Justice: That bill protected you-- your child from not having a conversation happening behind closed doors without your consent or knowledge. 

Which is a lovely thought, but of course has nothing to do with the actual language of the bill.

The they talk over each other for a bit, and then Harding floats his own straw man by being indignant that because he wants to be involved in every decision in his child's life, that somehow makes him anti-gay. I am impressed that at this late date, some of these folks still want to pretend that the bill is not about stifling LGBTQ folks. Smith observes, "I don't think you're anti-gay. I see this as a political move."

DeSantis's office sent a statement. Bet it doesn't include the part about opponents being a bunch of groomers. Oh--I sort of lose. He's going to say that leftists support sexualizing children, etc. 

Phil tosses a last softball to Harding "Do you want LGBTQ children to be safe in the state of Florida." And he hands back a fluffy obvious answer sandwich in which he somehow manages to get "all children matter" and "parents know best."

Oh, but snap-- Dave Hoffman calls him on his vaguerie and says it's interesting that he won't just say ":LGBTQ students should be safe in school" and challenges him to say it AND HE WON'T. Instead he accuses them of trying to spread fear etc etc. It's dangerous that they're trying to break kids down into groups and say certain kids matter more "It's dangerous." Jackson tries to stand up for him by saying that there is no such group as LGBTQ kids and Hannah talks back and Phil dismisses Harding in the midst of much talking.

With 8 minutes left we're switching to talking about race in school.

Phil says we've been talking about "the feud between parents and school boards and government"

He goes to Armour with the "why now" question, and Armour says sure we had the pandemic but we also had the George Floyd protests, with people pushing for more diversity, equity, and inclusion and now we have this backlash, demonizing it as critical race theory etc. and anything that will make me or my child uncomfortable is bad. Good summary, Professor Armour. If we're going to live in a pluralistic society, he continues, schools are going to have to teach this stuff. "in a sense, racism has been at the very foundation of this nation." Acknowledging that shouldn't make someone white feel bad. 

Armour keeps going, subtly noting that teaching reverence for the flag and patriotism is, in fact, teaching values (the director cuts to Jackson for a reaction shot). Armour gets to talk a lot (in talk show terms) and it's all good. I like "Good pedagogy says we are all in this together. We've made mistakes but we can move forward together."

Wrapup time. Phil waxes rhapsodic about teaching negotiation. Two principles-- focus on shared values and set differences, so that we can view it as a problem to be solved rather than a battle to be won, and two, how can I get the other side as much of what they want as I possibly can. I agree with that, but he seems stumped on how it can be applied here. "There has to be some motivation to put the children first," he says, and I'm thinking the word "the" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Lots of talk about loving children. He adds that he gets really nervous when we start talking about censorship (but we still pay attention to what our children are exposed to). He wishes we would be less combative and more cooperative and, well, Dr, Phil, welcome to the last thirty years of education policy. He likes Professor Armour's energy and spirit. 

I don't disagree with any of that, but for negotiations to work, you have to have two sides operating in good faith, and as M4L falls further and further down a political rabbit hole, and gets more and more aggressive in language when it's in friendly territory, it's harder and harder to see them as anything other than political operatives. 

Nothing left but thank you's and wrap-ups

I'll embed the episode here. If you do decide to watch it, for God's sake don't look at the comments.