What if I compiled a list of groups with whom I disagree? What if I labeled them “hate groups”? No one would care, because nobody in media turns to SJ for the “official” list of hate groups, as if that ends the discussion about whether a group is good, bad or otherwise. Instead, they turn to the Southern Poverty Law Center which, for many years under the guidance of now-ousted founder Morris Dees, put together a legitimate and circumspect list of groups promoting hate, at least to the extent hate fit their definition.

The SPLC, like the once-respected ACLU, has used its legacy credibility to burn not only hate groups, but any group whose purpose conflicts with what the current crop of SPLC savants deem correct. They’ve now included “Moms for Liberty” within that ambit.

Yesterday, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Year in Hate and Extremism 2022” report added parental-rights groups to its “Hate and Anti-Government groups Map,” including multiple chapters of Moms for Liberty, alongside neo-Nazis.

Few would take issue with neo-Nazis being characterized as a hate group. But Mothers?

The report further details how “hate groups were on the ground to intimidate people at school board and city council meetings” when the GOP “attacked inclusive education,” “LGBTQ people,” and “women and people who can get pregnant.” This is ridiculous. Parents protesting overtly sexual content in their young children’s schools may be controversial, but it is far from hate. To conflate preserving children’s innocence and influencing what sexualized material they are exposed to at a young age with bigotry symbolizes a twisted, hypersexual culture. This comes just weeks after the Department of Education accused a local Georgia school district of creating a hostile environment for its students after screening middle- and elementary-school library books for sexually explicit material.

Much as I strongly disagree with, and condemn, certain tactics being employed in furtherance of this cause, such as the removal of books from libraries banning of books and criminalizing curricula with which are claimed to be inappropriate, it is hardly wrong for parents to be concerned about the morphing of education from substantive educational content into woke ideology.

SPLC describes Moms for Liberty as one of the leading “reactionary anti-student inclusion groups”; the group protesting a drag show is SPLC’s example of its hatred, implying quite heavily that drag is an immutable characteristic. Yet a glance at the nonprofit’s website shows that its women leaders (or, as SPLC would call them, “women and people who can get pregnant”) run the gamut of truly immutable characteristics. Their director of Hispanic Outreach is described as a “Colombian American businesswoman, journalist, philanthropist, strategy adviser, contributor and commentator, and humble servant to the Lord.” Tia Bess, director of National Engagement, left Philadelphia as a child due to gang violence and is now “a mom of three with a blended family” who hopes to spread the message that “her zip code didn’t define her.” Much of these moms’ mission is against having their children be defined by their immutable characteristics.

Such actions as protesting drag shows runs counter to free speech, as a principle, and often as protected conduct under the First Amendment. Don’t like them? Don’t go. If some other parent wants to take their kids to a drag show, what business is that of yours? Yet, just because drag shows are protected speech doesn’t mean they reflect sound judgment. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

The point of drag shows is to “normalize” transgender people, although being transgender doesn’t necessarily mean you channel Divine on a bad day and twerk for the kiddies. Whether this serves the purpose of de-stigmatizing transgender people or making them more controversial is a matter for debate. And, indeed, that’s the point, that Moms for Liberty is antagonistic to many of the newly-introduced changes in public schools and similar arenas designed to influence the views of young children. Disagreeing with woke isn’t hate, unless there is no tolerance for disagreement.

But if they’re engaged in bad conduct, even if their putative purpose is to challenge ideology with whch they can fairly disagree, isn’t that good enough to label them a hate group? Consider that BLM blocks highways, unlawful conduct that disrupts the lives of many who are entitled to enjoy public roads. Or that some protesters break windows, deface property, burn windows. That conduct is condemnable too, and yet most people wouldn’t consider BLM a hate group, even if they have doubts about their fiscal integrity.

It’s bad enough that so many have lost tolerance for disagreement, the ability to agree to disagree about what is appropriate to teach children. It’s worse that parents who believe they, not teachers or school administrators, are charged with teaching their children values and morality, are being told they have no choice as to what ideology is taught in the classroom. But for the SPLC to reduce mothers who disagree with their children being indoctrinated into an ideology with which they disagree as being tantamount to neo-Nazis is outrageous.

Not that the SPLC had much cred before, but listing mothers who don’t want their children trained to be woke as a hate group reduces it to a joke. Stop using the SPLC as a legitimate source of “hate groups” unless the point is that media content is no more credible than its trusted legacy source.