Republicans have been pushing hard on “parents’ rights”—meaning book bans and elimination of any LGBTQ+ representation or serious discussion of race from public schools. It’s an effort to simultaneously fuel their base with culture war hysteria and win back the white suburban mom voting bloc with a subject they’re supposed to care about more than any other: protecting their kids.
It’s a campaign that’s created a great deal of noise and a series of state laws limiting what can be taught. In 2022, as far-right school board candidates took over in many places, it looked promising for Republicans. This week, though, groups like Moms for Liberty hit serious opposition, losing a substantial majority of the races where they endorsed candidates.
There are explanations for this. Most broadly, Americans are rarely quite as hateful as Republicans are banking on these days. But in the wake of Tuesday’s elections, it’s important to talk about something else Republicans may be missing: Parents of school-age kids in 2023 are younger Gen-Xers and, increasingly, elder millennials. Those are, broadly speaking, people who have grown up and lived their whole lives on the other side of the culture war.
Every age group has its hard-right members, of course. The founders of Moms for Liberty are in their early 40s, and they’re hateful, bigoted, frightened people. But when Republicans try to use these issues to peel off swing voters in places like Loudoun County or Fairfax County, Virginia, they may not be on the friendly territory they had imagined. Part of this is the widespread failure to realize that millennials have grown up. People got so used to them being the wacky kids that it’s only just starting to sink in across the national discourse that millennials, who were born between 1981 and 1996, are full-fledged adults now. And they’ve brought their formative cultural influences with them.
There’s long been a generational divide on much of this culture-war fodder, and on LGBTQ+ issues in particular. In 2006, a Gallup poll found 50% support for a constitutional amendment banning marriage equality, with 47% opposed to it. In the same poll, though, “A majority of women aged 18-49 say marriages between homosexual couples should be legally valid.” Three years later: “A majority of 18- to 29-year-olds think gay or lesbian couples should be allowed to legally marry, while support reaches only as high as 40% among the three older age groups.” The 18- to 29-year-olds of 2009 are many of today’s parents of school-age children, and 14 years after they reached majority support for marriage equality, the idea that their kids might go to the school library and check out a book with LGBTQ+ characters isn’t that scary.
The difference between generations goes well beyond support for same-sex marriage, though. While elder millennials and young Gen-Xers aren’t at the core of the gender identity revolution being carried out by Gen Z, they’re not baby boomers on this issue, either. Parents of today’s K-12 students went to see “The Matrix” in droves—and then saw its makers come out as trans women. They were at formative ages when Hilary Swank won the best actress Oscar for playing a trans man in “Boys Don’t Cry.” They are of a similar age to prominent trans women like Laverne Cox and Janet Mock. That trans people exist and are fully human is not a brand-new idea for them, and while there’s still a long way to go, polls do reflect an age gap on trans issues just as, 15 years ago, there was an age gap on marriage.
Today’s parents are also exposed to what their kids are bringing home. Part of what makes Moms for Liberty members so angry is seeing the diversity of thought and identity that their kids are embracing, not so much because of teachers and librarians as because of peers and the broader youth culture. People ages 30 to 49 are more forward-thinking on trans issues than older generations, but the gap is still bigger between that age group and those ages 18 to 29. It’s a pretty safe bet that if you polled 12- to 17-year-olds, there’d be another jump. Many parents may struggle with how to use they/them pronouns (and be chided by their kids for it), but the ones who aren’t reacting with reflexive hatred and rage—the ones whose kids can talk to them—are catching the edges of that gender identity revolution. Maybe they read some of the massively popular “Wings of Fire” books, with their panoply of LGBTQ+ characters, to or with their kids. Or were in the room as their kids watched any of the many children’s TV shows with nonbinary or gender-fluid characters, from Netflix’s “Ridley Jones” to Disney’s “The Owl House.”
The Moms for Liberty Republican culture-war appeal isn’t just about LGBTQ+ issues, of course. It’s also extremely racist. And once again, you don’t have to claim that elder millennials and young Xers are immune to racism to know that they are a more racially diverse population than older generations and grew up in an increasingly racially diverse United States of America. Certainly some members of these generations are scared racists in a defensive crouch, enraged by any acknowledgement of Black and brown people in this country (again, see the founders of Moms for Liberty), and heaven knows too many white people in this age range are susceptible to “I want equality for everyone but they’re demanding too much”-type arguments. But people under 50 are more likely to recognize fundamental inequities in the U.S. and the need for more progress on racial equality. And, as with LGBTQ+ representation, they’re people who grew up seeing enough racial diversity in popular culture to think it’s weird and wrong that banning efforts are disproportionately targeting books and movies about Black and brown characters.
Today’s parents of school-age children had childhoods during which “The Cosby Show” was the biggest show on TV year after year, then came of age during the 1990s boom in Black movies and sitcoms. Similarly, during their lives, hip-hop became widely popular with white audiences. Many other forms originated by Black musicians had become popular with white audiences over the preceding decades, of course, but in the past, it was more common for white musicians to take up and take over Black-originated forms. While there are plenty of notable white rap and hip-hop artists, it has remained a Black-owned form in a way that rock and roll, for instance, did not as it was popularized by white musicians for white audiences.
Film and television remain disproportionately white, and #OscarsSoWhite went viral in 2015 for good reason. Simple representation is not enough to fully transform people’s politics, but a lot of elder millennials and young Xers are going to bristle at the suggestion that white kids must be protected from depictions of Black and brown people.
Republicans have spent the past two years thinking they’re going to win over white suburban moms with school-based culture wars centered on a so-called “parents’ rights” argument. It seems to be a big motivating issue for the younger faction of the Republican base, and it might help the party turn out its own voters. But this argument’s reach into the messy ranks of swing voters doesn’t appear to be what Republicans hoped for. This week’s election results suggest that as people start paying attention to what’s really going on with these policy pushes and the candidates trying to bring them to local school boards, they’re rejecting all of it.
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