Liberty:
“a kind of freedom, whether it’s freedom from tyranny, freedom from confinement, or simply the freedom of choice.” (Courtesy of Vocabulary.com.)
Moms for Liberty:
“an American political organization that 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.
“Many of the group’s chapters across the U.S. have forged close ties to right-wing extremist groups, including the Proud Boys and Three Percenters, as well as sovereign citizen, QAnon, and Christian nationalist organizations.” (Courtesy of Wikipedia.)
Welcome to Moms for Liberty, an organization that believes in personal liberty and freedom. It is important to understand that Moms for Liberty appears to have elasticized the concepts of liberty and freedom to better fit the contours of their own unique ideology:
- They want to be liberated from mask and vaccine mandates for themselves and their children, and they want the freedom to disregard public health guidance and the common good in favor of doing exactly as they please at all times. They don’t appear to care if they and their children catch a deadly virus and then transmit it to their friends, relatives, and neighbors.
- They want their children to be liberated from learning about the United States’ dark history of racism, discrimination, sexism, and homophobia. In order to liberate their children from the dangers of a comprehensive education, they have infiltrated and disrupted local school boards all over America. Now their children have been freed, at last, from the chains of truth and cultural literacy, at the expense of a quality education for everyone else’s kids.
- They want to be liberated from “woke” values like diversity, equity, and inclusion.
- They want to be liberated from having to interact with LGBTQ+ people, and they want to deny trans individuals the freedom to live their own authentic lives.
- They want to be liberated from having to share the planet with folks who aren’t just like them.
We are at a unique crossroads in this country, where terms that were previously understood to be clearly defined now appear to mean the opposite of their established definitions. Moms for Liberty seems to embrace a new definition of liberty that might be described as follows:
“Liberty means arranging the world to conform to your desires, needs, and biases without consideration that other people might be harmed or oppressed by the universal application of your particular values. Liberty means that if you think you are right about an issue, you should be able to stifle discourse and force others to either conform to your views or be deprived of the opportunity to live their own lives with safety, dignity, and respect.” (Courtesy of the The Vickie Shufton Compendium of Made-Up Definitions.)
In our upside-down world, the term “liberty” actually means “suppression.” In our upside-down world, the word “freedom” more accurately resembles “selfishness.” In our upside-down world, the word “patriot” more closely aligns with “insurrectionist.” In our upside-down world, the Christian Nationalist movement is one of the least Christ-like movements on the planet.
We’ve gone through the looking glass, down the rabbit hole, and into an old man’s armoire to discover that nothing on the other side accords with anything we previously thought to be real or true.
I can’t help but think of the final few words of the Pledge of Allegiance: “with liberty and justice for all.” In our new upside-down world, it seems that this phrase, too, has acquired its own topsy-turvy gloss, now aligning more closely with the phrase, “with liberty and justice for some.” We exercise our freedom to savage, revile, and oppress, brandishing our bigotries like tiki-torches, all too willing to burn down the village regardless of who and what our hatreds might destroy.
Moms for Liberty and their ilk have clearly put a new spin on the old concept of “liberty and justice.” Please feel free to adjust your perspective so that you can now consider that tired old phrase in its new and proper context: “Liberty and just us.”
