To stop censorship, we must let Moms for Liberty speak

I have a picture in my office of six people behind a banner in front of a Cincinnati courthouse in 1990. “The Perfect Moment to Stop Censorship,” the banner blares, in bright blue letters.

The protesters were condemning criminal obscenity indictments against a local museum and its director for exhibiting “The Perfect Moment,” a collection of controversial photographs by the prominent artist Robert Mapplethorpe. The photos are hard to look at and include a self-portrait of Mapplethorpe with a bullwhip up his anus. But a jury in Cincinnati — a notably conservative city — acquitted the museum and its director, ruling that the exhibit was protected free speech under the First Amendment.

My, how times have changed.

» READ MORE: Moms for Liberty: What it is and who’s behind the group

In our own era, Americans across the political spectrum are trying to censor each other. We no longer have enough faith in ourselves — or in America — to allow speech that disgusts or offends us.

That’s the real story of the battle over Moms for Liberty, which is holding its conference here next week. The organization is trying to censor schoolbooks, curricula, and teachers. And protesters are trying to censor it in return, claiming that Moms for Liberty should have no place in Philadelphia.

They have called on the Downtown Marriott to cancel the conference. And they have demanded that the Museum of the American Revolution scrap plans to host a “Welcome to Philadelphia” reception for Moms for Liberty on June 29. “Everything they stand for is in conflict with our mission,” said one museum staffer, Xander Karkruff, who is queer.

Karkruff is right. Despite its name, Moms for Liberty is an organization devoted to inhibiting the values that our Founding Fathers proclaimed: freedom, equality, and the open exchange of ideas. It has supported gag laws restricting what schools can teach about race and gender. Most notoriously, Moms for Liberty members have suggested — without evidence — that teachers who address LGBTQ-related issues are “grooming” young children for sexual abuse.

But protesters’ attempts to silence Moms for Liberty by canceling the welcome event also violates the mission of the museum — which is “to share diverse and inclusive stories about our nation’s history with the broadest audience possible,” a museum spokesperson said recently. The protesters share the same impulse that motivates censors in all times and places: If something disgusts and offends us, we must stamp it out.

That’s what led government authorities to seize gay-themed periodicals in the 1950s until the U.S. Supreme Court intervened. It’s what sparked the campaign to block the 1990 Mapplethorpe exhibit, curated by the Institute of Contemporary Art at Penn. And, yes, it’s what moves Moms for Liberty to target LGBTQ-themed books and curricula.

Let’s be clear: There’s a big difference between passing a law that restricts instruction in our classrooms and shutting down a reception at a museum. Our students and teachers have a First Amendment right to read, write, and speak in school. Nobody has a constitutional right to go to a cocktail party.

But the effort to shut down Moms for Liberty nevertheless violates the spirit of liberty, which the famed jurist Learned Hand defined as “the spirit which seeks to understand the mind of other men and women” and “the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.” And once we lose that, he warned, we would lose everything. “Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women,” Hand declared in a 1944 speech. “When it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.”

The effort to shut down Moms for Liberty violates the spirit of liberty.

Hand eerily prefigured our current illiberal moment. We have stopped trying to understand each other. We are sure — too sure — that we are right. And we are equally sure that our enemies are wrong.

Listen to an LGBTQ staffer at the Museum of the American Revolution, explaining to the Philadelphia Gay News why the museum should cancel its Moms for Liberty reception: “Our space is filled with public exhibits that are anathema to the Moms’ agenda. How do they expect those people to react when they see things like the ‘Black Founders’ exhibit? Or the Stonewall exhibit?”

Frankly, I’d love to see Moms for Liberty confront information about African Americans in the Revolution and gay liberation activists in the 1960s. Maybe it would learn something about groups it had neglected or denigrated. And maybe the rest of us would learn something about Moms for Liberty, which might not be the singularly evil force we have imagined.

It’s the perfect moment to stop censorship. The question is whether we have the courage to step into the challenge, instead of continuing to shout down speech we despise.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author (with cartoonist Signe Wilkinson) of “Free Speech and Why You Should Give a Damn.”