By Jarrett Renshaw and James Oliphant
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) -Top rivals for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination on Friday addressed the national conference of Moms for Liberty, appealing to the conservative parents-rights advocacy group with vows to bolster education and keep discussion of gender identity out of the classroom.
“Don’t mess with America’s moms,” former President Donald Trump told the crowd in Philadelphia, calling the group a “grassroots juggernaut.”
The appearance of Trump and rivals Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley at the summit served 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.
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.
Trump, the front-runner in the race to challenge Democratic President Joe Biden, said he was best positioned among the field to win suburban women.
“You know what they want?” he said. “They want peace. They want lower taxes. They want good education.”
Trump vowed to “take historic action to defeat the toxic poison of gender ideology to restore the timeless truth that God created two genders, male and female.”
DeSantis, Florida’s governor and Trump’s closest challenger, talked up his record on education, telling the crowd how 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.
Several hundred people from liberal advocacy groups protested outside the hotel where the event was held on Friday. Before the 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 were seen working recently at DeSantis’ presidential campaign events in Iowa. DeSantis’ wife, Casey DeSantis, will campaign solo in Iowa next week as part of a new “Mamas for DeSantis” outreach effort, his campaign said on Friday.
Kerry Gillespie, 46, who said she had been battling what she termed overreaching school policies in her Maryland neighborhood, said at the Moms for Liberty event 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 of 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, the former governor of South Carolina and ambassador to the United Nations under Trump, publicly defended Moms for Liberty after the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups, labeled it 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.”
(Reporting by Jarrett Renshaw, Nathan Layne in Philadelphia and James Oliphant in WashingtonEditing by Colleen Jenkins, Alistair Bell and Leslie Adler)
