The effort is being driven by a loose collection of local and national conservative parents’ groups and politicians who have found a rewarding culture war battle in children’s books about gender, diversity and sexuality.The majority of these groups were created during the pandemic as part of a broader “parents’ rights” movement that formed in opposition to Covid-related masking and remote learning policies in schools and that has since widened its focus to include challenging library and classroom books about race and LGBTQ issues.As various factions lobby to get those books taken off the shelves, librarians like Jones have been swept up in what veterans of the field say is an unprecedented wave of hostility.Deborah Caldwell-Stone, the director of the association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom, characterized the book-banning movement as a politically motivated campaign to “disrupt education, stigmatize the voices of marginalized groups and engage in its own form of indoctrination.” “What we have been observing is a growing effort to censor books that reflect the experiences of marginalized groups under this idea that, somehow, either that it’s morally unacceptable for any young person to know that there are gay people in the world, or that a narrative about U.S. history that illuminates systemic racism is somehow un-American and Marxist,” Caldwell-Stone told me.On Facebook, Moms for Liberty’s main page features posts about cancel culture, school mask mandates and “the sexualization of children.” The New Yorker’s Paige Williams, who recently wrote a deep dive on the group, noted that “its instant absorption"