What Happens When Moms for Liberty Takes Over Your School Board

These activists were preceded by the abolitionists and the women’s suffrage movement, both of which included mothers. Here in Wyoming, women secured the right to vote in 1869, years before statehood, making it the first American state or territory to extend suffrage to women—more than 50 years before that same right was extended to all women in the nation with the adoption of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

More recently another type of public mother has emerged. The kind of woman who has made being an aggrieved mom into a semi-professional persona based on their progeny. These mothers seem to be continuously angry at and distrustful of teachers, public officials and other institutional authorities.

These are the women I often see at sometimes-rowdy school board meetings in Cheyenne, which I began to attend regularly in 2022.

Fueled by pandemic masking angst, Moms for Liberty, a national group founded in 2021 and based in Florida, has grown to have 310 chapters in 48 states. It claims a national membership of 130,000. There’s a chapter in Cheyenne—Laramie County Moms for Liberty. They offer their comments at public meetings and, with their allies, run slates of candidates for school board.

Marguerite Herman ran on her own, and served two terms on Cheyenne’s public school board from 2014 to 2022. The mother of three students educated in Cheyenne’s public schools, Herman recalls the levels of anxiety accompanying pandemic lockdown and, later, distancing and masking requirements. During that time, she says, people wearing Moms for Liberty T-shirts began to stand up at board meetings to “heckle us for the Covid policy we had put into place in the spring of 2020.” As outgoing board chair in 2020, she says got two death threats and reported one to police. She says other board members got them, too, and in 2021 one member had their outdoor Christmas decorations vandalized.

According to Herman, this was fueled by a variety of factors:

The Election of 2020 saw the results of the work that had gone into demonizing public education, fueling parents with fear and resentment over COVID, reducing [school] trustee elections to partisan loyalty. The result was reaping political rewards. … They turned hardship, uncertainty and chaos into political opportunity. A lot of lies were told by the Wyoming Family Alliance.

The Wyoming Family Alliance is a Christian Nationalist political organization. On its website the group describes itself as “a Christian ministry” that believes the “66 books of the Bible to be … infallible, authoritative and accurate for life and eternity.”

The Wyoming Family Alliance works closely with Laramie County Moms for Liberty. The two groups have jointly hosted the “See You At The Library” event in Laramie County. See You At The Library is a nationwide annual story hour organized by Brave Books, a publisher of “books for kids that reinforce biblically-based, foundational values.” (This year in Washington, D.C., See You At The Library was held at the Library of Congress and co-sponsored by the Department of Education’s Center for Faith.)

In 2022, this groundwork by Wyoming Family Alliance and Moms for Liberty paid off at the ballot box. Herman says:

Of the four [newly elected school board] members, three were handpicked by Wyoming Family Alliance/Moms for Liberty. That changed the orientation of the board. The Moms represent themselves as the only able, trusted voice to run the school district: “We know what you need and we will defend your rights—but you need to sign them over to us.”

At the top of the newly constituted board’s agenda was “protecting children” from books in school libraries. It took time, but in December 2023 with dogged willingness to ignore distinguished legal criticism, overwhelming negative public comment and polling revealing wide opposition to banning books, the school administration, at the direction of the board, began labelling nominated books in the school library.

Since the policy’s adoption, 44 of 49 nominated books have been deemed “sexually explicit.” Among them are Pulitzer-prize winner Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye, Alice Sebold’s memoir Lucky, Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants and Alan Ginsberg’s Collected Poems. The King James Bible was nominated but escaped being labeled “sexually explicit.”

In October 2024, Jared Genron reported in Cheyenne’s Cap City News:

Brooke Bulgrin, the Laramie County Moms for Liberty treasurer, has submitted around 50 of the district’s 63 form nominations as of late September. [Laramie County Moms for Liberty Chair Patricia] McCoy has sent in five.

In August 2024, the school board went one step further and, against yet more strong opposition from the community, adopted a newly restrictive “media procurement” policy. As one book-banning (now former) school board member texted to another the previous month:

I have been telling “my peeps” not to get too upset about the policy right now. That we will have the final say on wording. And we have a 5-2 majority. … I want to solidify that we are NOT purchasing ANY books with sexually explicit content. … To further this, I believe there was a blurb about AP English classes required reading that contains sexually explicit content.

How did this happen? Why did a longstanding policy that allowed parents to “opt out” their student from reading any particular book in a public school library—a policy that had been reviewed in detail by the previous board and school district administration—suddenly require upending? How did opting out no longer serve to “protect children,” including high schoolers, some of them old enough to drive and sign a contract?

Moms for Liberty may be the loudest voices now, but they are far from the only ones. In fact, their rise prompted Cheyenne citizens concerned for the future of public education to organize a response.

One of those people is Dr. Rene Hinkle. Hinkle defeated an incumbent Moms For Liberty-endorsed candidate in 2022 for the school board. She says she ran “to try to bring back some reasonable opinion to the board.” The mother of two daughters educated in Cheyenne’s public schools, Hinkle began attending board meetings during Covid after Cheyenne pediatricians were intimidated into staying away. “I went in their stead,” she says, “to support continued masking.” This was her first encounter with Moms for Liberty. She continued to attend when book banning discussions began.

The 2024 school board election brought another new face to the board, retired Cheyenne teacher Barb Cook. One Moms for Liberty-endorsed member elected in 2022 resigned in 2024; the board appointed an apparently like-minded replacement.

So now, the board often splits 4 to 3. In the meantime, Moms for Liberty and the Wyoming Family Alliance are trying to get a bill passed in the state legislature that would impose a civil penalty of up to $50,000 for failing to ensure that no “sexually explicit” materials are at any time accessible in the children’s section of a public library.

Does that mean children’s art books about Degas, who painted many a ballerina showing a little cleavage? Or children’s books discussing human reproduction? What about kid-friendly Bibles, which may well include the story of Samson and Delilah, not to mention King Solomon and his many wives and concubines? How would Wyoming’s cash-strapped county libraries ever afford to pay such a fine if one of its workers was found to have “transgressed”?

This dumbing-down of America, as represented by efforts to control what people read, would not sit well with our country’s Founders. James Madison put it this way: “A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy.” And Thomas Jefferson wrote that governments “deriv[e] their just powers from the consent of the governed” and that education is what makes such consent possible.

If their detractors are correct and Moms for Liberty’s ultimate goal is to stymie people’s freedom to read freely, destroy public schools and usurp public educational authority, the Founders would be appalled. I know I already am.

Marion YoderMore by this author →

Marion Yoder, Wyoming native, writes from Cheyenne, its capital, where she cherishes the memory of her excellent mother, Louise Goins Yoder, 1921-1974. Her father’s first cousin, Leah Bain, a single mom who lived to 102, served for eight years on the Laramie County School Board in the 1960s. Before that, Bain taught in the district for years and was the first woman to become an elementary school principal in Cheyenne. These accomplishments were formally recognized when Bain Elementary School opened in 1961. Marion writes a monthly column for the Wyoming Tribune Eagle. She can be reached at mycolumn52@gmail.com.