By now, it’s well understood that the right’s efforts to restrict classroom discussion are all about marginalizing LGBTQ people under the guise of protecting children. But they also harbor a less obvious aim: to convince parents that kids are under threat in the first place. That mild-mannered teacher over there? She just might be scheming to pervert, indoctrinate and snatch away childhood innocence.

Caroline Mickey, the librarian at Alpine Crest Elementary School outside Chattanooga, Tenn., just learned this the hard way, when her idea for a Mother’s Day-themed lesson came under sudden and heavy fire from parents in the area. The vitriol of the attack, and the school district superintendent’s rapid decision to cancel her lesson in response, caught her off guard.

“It was overwhelming,” Mickey told me. “I didn’t realize it was going to be quite this intense.”

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The saga started when Mickey sent out a notice to parents of a planned lesson in advance of Mother’s Day. She wrote that the lesson would be “sensitive to the fact that not all students live with a mother,” by celebrating those who aren’t mothers but “fill the motherly roles in our lives.”

Mickey notified parents that two books would be read aloud to kids from kindergarten through second grade. One was “Stella Brings the Family,” about a girl who is unsure how to approach a Mother’s Day celebration at school because she has two dads. The other was “Mother Bruce,” about a bear who adopts a brood of goslings who believe he’s their mother.

“We have students who don’t have mothers for a variety of reasons,” Mickey told me. “But everyone has somebody who loves them the way that a mother does.”

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She offered parents the option of opting out of this lesson for their kids. In keeping with school district policy, she offered them an alternate lesson.

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Then Moms for Liberty — which is restricting classroom discussion and getting books purged from school libraries across the country — wheeled into action.

Members of its chapter in the red-leaning area around the school in Hamilton County attacked the idea on social media and in local newspapers as Leninist indoctrination, anti-Christian and a threat to Western civilization. One woman called on locals to pray for children to guard them against the demonic threat posed by those children’s books.

A handful of particularly vocal parents in the area took the bait. They savaged Mickey as a “groomer” and an enemy of traditional birth mothers, some in long, rambling rants, according to emails that Mickey showed me.

After this pressure, Hamilton County Schools Superintendent Justin Robertson canceled the lesson. According to an email from Robertson posted by the Tennessee Holler, a progressive local news site, he agreed that the lesson and the books were unacceptable material.

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It’s hard to see why. “Stella Brings the Family” isn’t really about her two dads. It’s about her anxiety about not fitting in with other kids with traditional birth mothers, and other kids’ uncertainty about her situation. The protagonist in “Mother Bruce” faces up to the complications of acting as a mother to goslings despite being a male bear. Both books are listed on Amazon as suitable for kindergartners.

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“There’s nothing unusual about assigning books like these to readers in early grades,” Jonathan Friedman, the director of free expression at PEN America, told me. “They are written with young children in mind, acknowledging the real world in which children find themselves — a world in which parental figures can differ. Hiding these facts from children does no favors either for them or for the society they inhabit.”

I asked Robertson to elaborate on his thinking, but he has yet to do so. Wherever his rationale, this chapter of Moms for Liberty is already known for regularly employing scorched-earth tactics, including hurling MAGA-type “pedophile” smears at foes. You can see why an educator might want to make the Moms for Liberty assault go away in the quickest possible way.

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This is dismaying parents on the other side of this divide. As Taylor Lyons, who regularly battles the region’s right-wing warriors as the head of the local group Moms for Social Justice, told me: “We were deeply disheartened by our district leadership’s reactionary response to a few complaints from far right puritanical extremists.”

Yet as we’ve already seen on other fronts, local officials are easily pushed into doing the bidding of small bands of far-right culture-warmongers. Lone activists are getting stacks of books banned on the flimsiest of objections. Educators are erasing controversial topics from their syllabuses or getting chased out of town.

Mickey, for her part, has had no choice but to accept the cancellation of her lesson. “It threw me,” she said. “I think I had higher expectations.” The new politics of enemy-creation, which seeks to foment constant fear among and between parents and teachers, is working exactly as intended.

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