CV NEWS FEED // The parents’ rights group Moms for Liberty responded after CBS’s “60 Minutes” ran a segment Sunday night misconstruing the group’s efforts against sexually explicit material in school libraries as “book banning.”
During the controversial segment, “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley interviewed the organization’s co-foundresses Tina Descovich and Tiffany Justice.
Both Descovich and Justice slammed the program shortly after the segment aired, implying that its production staff heavily and deceptively edited their interview footage in an attempt to discredit the growing parents’ rights movement.
On Friday morning, the show’s X (formerly Twitter) account posted a short video previewing the segment.
“Scott Pelley reports on the battle to ban 97 books in one South Carolina public school district and the role played by the national movement for ‘parental rights’ inspired by a group called Moms for Liberty,” stated the description of the 30-second clip.
A half-hour later, Justice commented on the clip, stating that she and Descovich “read graphic sexual content on camera to [Pelley] from books found in public school libraries all over the country.”
“Do you think that [‘60 Minutes’] will air that footage?” Justice asked.
During the portion of the interview that aired, Pelley accused the two mothers of being “evasive.”
“They often dodged questions with talking points,” the CBS correspondent said via a later-added voiceover that drowned out Descovich and Justice’s responses to his questions.
Pelley acknowledged that Justice read a sexually explicit book marketed to minors during the interview. However, due to his voiceover, the segment’s viewers were unable to hear the book’s contents.
The book that Justice brought to the interview appears to be “Gender Queer,” a highly controversial pornographic novel that is present in many school libraries nationwide.
As CatholicVote previously reported, the book “contains depictions of pedophilia – sexual acts between minors and adults.”
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“In a tactic of outrage politics, Moms For Liberty takes a kernel of truth and concludes these examples are not rare mistakes but a plot to sexualize children,” Pelley continued.
Descovich posted to X an unedited version of an answer she gave to a question the correspondent asked her, showing that the vast majority of it was edited out.
Pelley said via voiceover that she had refused to answer this question.
However, while the segment did not include Justice’s reading of “Gender Queer” or Descovich’s full answer to Pelley’s question, it did spend over 30 seconds discussing the personal life of the third Moms For Liberty co-foundress, Bridget Ziegler.
Ziegler left the organization shortly after its founding three years ago.
Many observers joined Justice and Descovich in calling out the apparent bias on the part of “60 Minutes.”
One X user accused the network of “spreading slanted propaganda.”
Even clinical psychologist and author Dr. Jordan Peterson chimed in.
“The legacy media is doomed and [‘60 Minutes’] with it,” he wrote. “And good bloody riddance.”
“No one’s banning books,” Justice told MSNBC’s Joy Reid during a contentious interview earlier this year. “Write the book, print the book, publish the book, put the book in the public library, sell the book.”
“We’re talking about a public school library,” she emphasized.
“Children don’t have unfettered access to the internet at school,” Justice also said during the January MSNBC interview. “The subject matter in the books that moms are concerned about is the same things that kids don’t have access to on the internet.”
Readers can watch CatholicVote’s exclusive interview with Moms For Liberty co-foundress Tiffany Justice here.
