A 60 Minutes segment on the growing trend of right-wing book bans featured an interview with two women who co-founded the “parental rights” group Moms for Liberty, during which correspondent Scott Pelley chided them for dodging questions with “talking points” and avoiding his repeated questions about the group’s attacks on LGBTQ+ Americans.
Pelley opened the report by interviewing a school board member from Beaufort, South Carolina, named Dick Geier, a Republican who nonetheless has seen his life upended by conservatives in his community who have begun to complain in droves about books and curriculum used in the district.
In the past, these sorts of issues would be solved via parental opt-out forms issued through school libraries restricting what books certain students can check out, Geier said. But following the viral success of groups like Moms for Liberty—which has been labeled an extremist group by the Southern Poverty Law Center—in galvanizing complaints that have the power to overwhelm schools’ bureaucracies, everything has changed for local administrators tasked with handling the backlash.
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“Parents have the right to determine what their children are taught and what they’re allowed to read, no doubt about it,” he told Pelley. “But what we’re having a problem with is parents that want to determine what other parents’ rights are for their children to read what they want.”
When asked about these issues, Moms for Liberty co-founders Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich repeatedly skirted Pelley’s questions, forcing him to at one point exasperatedly point out the obvious: “You’re being evasive.”
Descovich opened the interview with her own ode to the teaching profession, with the caveat that there is a growing trend of “rogue teachers” in American classrooms.
“We love teachers. My children have had the best teachers. I’ve had the greatest teachers that have influenced and impact me,” she said. “But there are rogue teachers in America’s classrooms right now.”
“Parents send their children to school to be educated, not indoctrinated into ideology,” Justice agreed.
But when pressed on what, exactly, that ideology is, neither of the women had answers—leading Pelley to intervene in a voiceover: “They often dodged questions with talking points.”
“What ideology are the children being indoctrinated into? What is your fear?” Pelley asked at one point following a moment of crosstalk.
“I think parents’ fears are realized,” Justice said, pointing to books dealing with topics including sexuality and gender that 60 Minutes notes were often “written for older teens but found in a few lower schools.”
“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,” Pelley concludes in another voiceover.
Both Justice and Descovich refused to answer Pelley’s repeated questions about Moms for Liberty’s attacks on LGBTQ+ people, especially their repeated use of the word “groomer” in describing LGBTQ+ teachers.
After the two made several attempts to change the subject, Pelley again took to pointing out the obvious: “‘Grooming’ does not seem like a word that you want to take on.”
The report also points out the recent losses Moms for Liberty suffered at the ballot box, with two-thirds of the 166 school board candidates endorsed by the group losing their races in 2023.
Pelley then pointed to the example of Beaufort, which fought back against the flood of complaints about library books by asking a group of volunteers from the community to read the books themselves.
The result? Just five of the 92 books reviewed were taken off school shelves.
