Just Mad Mamas?

The mission of Moms for Liberty (M4L) sounds agreeable enough. Founded in 2021, the group says on its website that it seeks to “engage on key issues” and “spread awareness” on matters of “parental rights” — among other equally anodyne goals. But the true nature of the Moms’ work depends on whom you ask. The Southern Poverty Law Center included the group in its 2022 Year in Hate & Extremism Report, citing M4L’s opposition to the teaching of Black and LGBTQ history and its passion for book bans. A 2023 article in Academe, the magazine of the American Association of University Professors, places M4L in a lineage of censorship efforts including the Hays Code, which imposed moralistic restrictions on film content, and another organization that waged culture war under the sign of the mom: the Parents Music Resource Center. 

Success may have many fathers, but the PMRC, which opposed violence and sex in popular music, was an explicitly maternal endeavor. A spousal one, too: holding its first public meeting in May 1985, the PMRC’s founding cadre mostly comprised the wives of the Washington elite. One was Susan Baker, whose husband was Ronald Reagan’s Treasury secretary. Undoubtedly the most prominent mom was Tipper Gore, married to Tennessee Sen. Al Gore. Gore’s moment of awakening, recalled in her 1987 book, Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society, came when she bought Prince’s Purple Rain for her daughter and overheard the lyrics of “Darling Nikki,” in which the titular character, a “sex fiend,” is observed “masturbating with a magazine.” (In the photograph on Raising PG Kids’ cover, teenagers stand in front of the movie poster for Amber Aroused — a 1987 porn film featuring, according to one synopsis, “a robot capable of serving drinks and satisfying women with a penis attachment.”) Susan Baker’s origin story was similar, but substitute Madonna and “Like a Virgin.” Her daughter asked, inevitably: “Mama, what’s a virgin?”

The PMRC endured through the 1990s, promoting tenuous links between song lyrics and various social ills — teen suicide, substance abuse, satanism. But its high-water mark was a September 1985 Senate Commerce committee hearing remembered today as an unlikely mashup of politics and pop culture, featuring such spectacles as a pastor dolefully reciting the lyrics of a metal song called “Golden Showers.” Tipper Gore testified; taking the opposing view, so did John Denver and Frank Zappa. The hearing represented a gathering of uneasy bedfellows, like the organization that inspired it. Consisting of Democratic and Republican wives alike, the PMRC advertised itself as a group beyond politics, later described by Baker as “just mad mamas” concerned about their kids’ cultural diets. 

At the same time, the PMRC relied on the contributions of a range of ultraconservative actors, from a Focus on the Family “youth culture specialist” to the Colorado beer magnate Joseph Coors, who provided funding. Coors, who died in 2003, devoted his career to softening the ground of American politics and culture for far-right ideas: in 1973, he cofounded the conservative Heritage Foundation, the political juggernaut behind the Trump administration’s Project 2025 initiative. He even dabbled directly in media production in the 1970s, helping launch a television alternative to the liberal news media — such as a Fox News prototype that employed a young Roger Ailes. Richard Nixon nominated Coors for a seat on the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but Coors’ television work, and the apparent conflict of interest it presented, helped scuttle his confirmation (as did revelations of sympathies with the John Birch Society). 

The following decade, the PMRC afforded Coors another opportunity to make his mark, functioning as a kind of conduit for the transmission of censorious ideas about culture from the fringes of the American Right into the political mainstream. There’s a clear resonance between the work of the PMRC and latter-day groups like Moms for Liberty: both sought to restrict the circulation of information in the name of protecting children. But where M4L appears continuous with a long-held political vision of the Right, Gore evoked the airy language of liberal democracy to make a putatively nonpolitical case — while forging alliances with deeply reactionary political actors. 

The organization existed in a strange political moment, emerging at a time when its supporters could successfully argue that “culture” and “children” were subjects beyond politics — yet presaging our current predicament, when the inexhaustible engine of right-wing grievance has led to the politicization of great swaths of popular culture. In her book, Gore appeared deeply averse to reckoning with the complex interplay of culture and politics. “No one should want a return to the sexual hypocrisy of the 1950s, which was unrealistic and often repressive,” she wrote, while her organization rebranded those criticisms in a more secular language of family and public morality. She was reluctant even to concede that the PMRC’s work may have had some bearing on the senatorial committee on which her husband sat. “The United States Congress had begun to take an interest in the issue, and many members considered holding hearings,” she wrote, by way of explaining the genesis of the 1985 hearing, dismissing as sexist any suggestions of inappropriate spousal influence. Al Gore, in his questioning, played the middle: He supported the goals of the PMRC while confessing to be a fan of Zappa, who delivered the hearing’s most hostile lines and dwelt energetically on the Washington-wives aspect of the organizing; in PG Kids, Gore described Zappa as a “middle-aged rocker” before decrying his and others’ “sexist comments about housewives.” 

Claims of sexism against the opposition notwithstanding, one signal of the essentially conservative nature of the PMRC project lies in the specific cultural products it targeted: its activists aimed a surprising amount of their ire at music by women. A third of the songs on the Filthy Fifteen — a list of tracks compiled by the PMRC to illustrate the scope of the problem — were neither violent nor satanic nor even particularly explicit. They were songs about women expressing sexual desire. The 1980s PMRC affair was in many ways a matter of gender instrumentalized, contested: buoyed by the support of antifeminist forces (in 1985, Gore received an award from Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum), a group of women qua women waged war with the culture, relying on the artistic output of other women — and, later and more consequentially, racialized minorities — to make their point. Spare a thought for poor Nikki, from the Prince song. She really wasn’t hurting anyone.

Though it hit the mainstream during the Reagan era, abetted by adjacent phenomena like the Satanic Panic, the 1980s opposition to rock music reflected a decades-old discontent. As postwar concerns over rock’s status as a marker of youth rebellion waned, “conservative Christian anti-rock discourse in the 1960s and 1970s continued to regard rock ’n’ roll with unabated alarm as a satanic cultural form that led to individual and societal degeneracy,” wrote musicologist Anna Nekola in 2013, citing activists such as Bob Larson, the prolific evangelical author of books with titles like Rock & Roll: The Devil’s Diversion. To these opponents, rock wasn’t just noxious; it was demonic, atheistic — a threat to American resolve during the Cold War.

In 1981, an article in televangelist Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority Report referred to rock and pop as “audio pornography,” a symptomatic choice of language in an era in which concern over the corrosive effects of actual pornography pervaded — and provided a space in which some feminists could find common cause with Falwell and his ilk. It may be no coincidence that one of the PMRC’s opening salvos, a 1985 Newsweek op-ed, used “porn rock” as a catchall, and that the term caught on — with its allusions to violence against women as well as its invocation of a category of expression whose First Amendment protections have been contested. In remarks at the 1985 hearing, South Carolina Sen. Fritz Hollings made the comparison explicit: “In the test of pornography, one of the things to look at is whether or not it has any redeeming social value.” Having recently listened to some of the “outrageous filth” in question, Hollings continued, “the redeeming social value that I find is inaudible.” 

“Porn rock” was doing, as they say, a lot of work here, allowing its critics to be indirect at best. The musicologist Joe Stuessy, a key witness, said the music under scrutiny was characterized by “extreme violence, extreme rebellion, substance abuse, sexual promiscuity and perversion and Satanism.” Looking at the Filthy Fifteen, one has to squint to reconcile that description with a good number of the actual songs — like Cyndi Lauper’s “She Bop,” a tribute to masturbation cloaked in euphemism: “I can’t stop messin’ with the danger zone.” On Mary Jane Girls’ “In My House,” the most explicit phrase is “makin’ love.” Madonna’s “Dress You Up” is about as inoffensive a pop song as you’ll find. It’s an incoherent list but, in its incoherence, one detects the influence of a wide-ranging anxiety about pop and rock as genres, and as reflections of a liberalizing society. Gore couldn’t have been unaware of the discourse that preceded her; her book cites the 1984 volume Why Knock Rock?, whose authors, the evangelical Peters brothers, cheerfully recount a public record burning they organized in 1979.

In the fall of 1985, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) came to an agreement with the PMRC that led to the placement of stickers on album covers bearing the now recognizable phrase PARENTAL ADVISORY EXPLICIT LYRICS. Gore praised the outcome in language that today can be appreciated for its exquisite neoliberal tact: the labels, she wrote, were “a unique mechanism to increase consumer choice in the marketplace.” This was the essence of her pitch: that what the PMRC wanted was not less information circulating but more, the better to equip the anxious parent. But Gore did recognize that there was something implicitly coercive about her work, saying later that she regretted “the misperception that there was censorship involved.” In a 1999 article, academic Claude Chastagner described the fallout from the PMRC’s campaign as the “most formidable censorship machine in American popular music.” The stickers acted as a kind of beacon. Major retailers, notably Walmart, sometimes refused to sell stickered albums. Nearly 20 state governments debated legislation that would ban the sale of explicit music to minors, “relying on the RIAA label as a means to determine which records had to be censored.” One bill in Florida was introduced after a lawmaker attended a Tipper Gore lecture.

Throughout this campaign, the PMRC received vigorous assistance from its rightward flank and law enforcement. In 1989, an FBI official sent a letter to the record label that had released N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton, objecting to the song “Fuck Tha Police”; in 1990, authorities in Florida arrested record shop owners who sold 2 Live Crew’s As Nasty as They Wanna Be. Interest groups promoted the music’s criminalization: a 1989 article in Focus on the Family’s Citizenmagazine urged readers to “alert local police to the dangers they may face” from “Fuck Tha Police.” The article was by Bob DeMoss, a Focus “youth culture specialist” who helped script a PMRC educational video. His cowriter, PMRC executive director Jennifer Norwood, was quoted in the same issue of Citizen saying, “We want music critics and organizations like Focus on the Family to disseminate this information to their constituencies.” (This was all detailed in a 1989 Village Voice piece in which various parties denied various connections; the PMRC’s “official position,” the Voice’s Dave Marsh and Phyllis Pollack wrote, “is that it has no relationship with any group except the PTA and the pediatricians.”)

As the above examples suggest, by the end of the 1980s the conversation had shifted from rock to rap, and become more explicitly racialized. As several scholars have observed, the locus of concern shifted accordingly: rather than worrying what music was doing to “youth” as a vulnerable category of person, critics now worried about the dangers that “black youths posed to the society at large.” This was nowhere more apparent than in a Newsweek op-ed written by Tipper Gore and Susan Baker following the 1989 rape of a white jogger in Central Park, a crime for which five Black and Latino teens were arrested. In the piece, “Some Reasons for ‘Wilding,’” Gore and Baker drew links with their old cultural bugbear: “In the lockup,” the pair wrote, the arrested youth “were nonchalantly whistling at a policewoman and singing a high-on-the-charts rap song about casual sex: ‘Wild Thing.’” Famously, after each young man spent years in prison, the Central Park Five were exonerated.

Wittingly or not, Gore and her allies were helping take a political project that cohered in reaction to the gains of the 1960s — the sexual revolution, the civil rights movement — and render its cultural complaints legible in the more broadly palatable language of family and motherhood, all while enabling the scapegoating of some of the beneficiaries of those ’60s gains: women and Black people. Having helped advance these goals, the PMRC disappeared by the end of the century. Its backers continued to find succor in other political achievements — namely Joseph Coors’s Heritage Foundation, a key player in the American Right’s efforts to undo the liberal gains of the 20th century. That long-term campaign came most clearly to fruition with the Make America Great Again movement; on its website, Heritage boasted that the first Trump administration adopted 64 percent of the foundation’s policy prescriptions. It spearheaded Project 2025, the infamous document laying out ambitious goals for Trump’s second term — prominently, a multidirectional attack on speech in both the public sector and in private enterprise. 

Heritage has also been an important backer of Moms for Liberty. In January 2025, Moms cofounder Tiffany Justice joined the Heritage Foundation as a visiting fellow overseeing a new Parental Rights Initiative whose aim was to “dismantle the barriers that radical ideologues have erected between parents and their children”; in June 2025, she moved to Heritage Action, which lobbies Congress on behalf of the foundation’s goals. (Justice left the organization earlier this year.)

To hear Tipper Gore tell it, all the PMRC ever wanted was to equip parents with the tools to raise their children responsibly, a humble claim to parental control that admittedly falls apart when one reckons with the aftermath of the PMRC’s work — the legal dramas, the chilled speech. For Moms for Liberty and its allies, “parental control” represents something more dangerous to democracy: it’s a weapon that can be wielded against public institutions to suppress information contrary to the right-wing project, information that typically has to do with gender, sex, race, and history. Coors, like his fellow travelers in the conservative movement, was playing the long game.