Hate Intrudes on Thanksgiving

The Southern Poverty Law Center has placed a virtual who’s who of pro-family and Christian organizations, including the Family Research Council, the American Family Association and the Traditional Values Coalition, on a list of 13 “hate groups” for opposing the homosexual political agenda.

In its freshly released Winter 2010 Intelligence Report, SPLC labels five additional groups as “anti-gay,” including Concerned Women for America, the Christian Anti-Defamation Coalition, and Coral Ridge Ministries.

No authentic “hate” groups, by any conventional definition, are listed in SPLC’s article, “18 Anti-Gay Groups and Their Propaganda.”

“No organization better defines what a hate group is all about than the Southern Poverty Law Center,” said Robert Knight, Washington correspondent for Coral Ridge Ministries. “Smearing legitimate groups merely for disagreeing about homosexuality is a very hateful act.”

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“This underscores why many of us opposed passage of the federal hate-crimes bill, which lays the groundwork for making Christian morality into a form of hate punishable under the law,” Knight continued. “The SPLC has included several groups in the past that did not belong on a legitimate list, such as Family Research Institute, Mission America, and Americans for Truth about Homosexuality, and now they’ve widened their smear to include even more Christian organizations that defend traditional morality in the public square.”

SPLC officials were not available to comment.

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“The Left’s smear campaigns of conservatives is being driven by the clear evidence that the American public is losing patience with their radical policy agenda as seen in the recent election and in the fact that every state, currently more than thirty, that has had the opportunity to defend the natural definition of marriage has done so,” said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council. {snip}

“We are going to form a coalition of organizations to lobby Congress to withhold funds from SPLC,” Christian Anti-Defamation Coalition head Gary L. Cass told WND. “We will also demand Congress restrict federal law enforcement from relying on the biased SPLC reports, like the discredited ‘Report on Right-Wing Extremism’ SPLC wrote for the Department of Homeland Security.”

“It’s disturbing that the U.S. Department of Justice takes its cue from Morris Dees’ SPLC as to which groups fit the ‘hate’ criteria. I wonder how many Americans would be comfortable with seeing their tax dollars go toward supporting a hate group like the SPLC,” Knight added.

Wendy Wright, president of Concerned Women for America, contended that SPLC is more focused on advancing a radical political agenda than on combating hatred.

“This might be an opportunity to point out who are actually filled with hate and bigotry,” said Wright. {snip}

“It’s the homosexual groups that have violated and invaded churches, vandalized homes and cars, that instigate death threats against people who are simply trying to uphold traditional values,” Wright observed.

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Prior to November’s secular-socialism rollback, America’s ever-shrill “progressive” machine contorted in a desperate effort to paint the Tea Party movement as a horde of hateful, inbred racists. Judging by the results, it was an epic failure.

Instead, and thanks at least in part to the left’s overreaching smear campaign, the grass-roots Tea Party groundswell–representing every facet of traditional American values–grew to become a political force of nature.

Now the frays of the fanatical fringe have done it again. These so-called “progressives,” led by the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center SPLC, have gifted the American mainstream with yet another teachable moment. The SPLC is a small, hard-left political activist outfit known for promoting a panoply of radical liberal causes. The center holds itself out as an objective monitor of potentially violent or subversive hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, skinheads and other white supremacists.

But in recent years–and with increasing abandon–the SPLC has leveraged (abused, really) its rapidly decreasing political capital and waning credibility to target and undermine organizations that, rather than dealing in the business of genuine “hate,” instead pose a direct threat to the advancement of postmodern secular-socialism generally–and to the Democratic Party specifically. {snip}

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Following to the letter Saul Alinsky’s admonition to “pick the target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it,” the SPLC, in its most recent Intelligence Report, has “officially” labeled a number of highly influential mainstream conservative and Christian organizations as “hate groups.”

Most notably, the SPLC has placed alongside the Klan and other neo-Nazi organizations, the Washington, D.C., based Family Research Council (FRC) and the Mississippi-based American Family Association (AFA). Their crime? “Anti-gay . . . propagation of known falsehoods” (read: recognition of stubborn, politically incorrect scientific and theological facts that are beyond serious debate). I say “most notably” because these two groups alone contain membership rolls in the millions.

Moreover, the FRC and AFA play host to presidential candidates, lawmakers and top conservative leaders from around the world at Washington’s annual Values Voters Summit–one of the largest conservative political gatherings of the year.

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So, center-right America: If you happen to believe in the sanctity of natural marriage and that, as a culture, we’re best served by honoring the Judeo-Christian sexual ethic of our forefathers, you’re now an official “hater.”

Of course, the tired goal of this silly meme is to associate in the public mind’s eye mainstream conservative social values with racism, white supremacy and neo-Nazism. The ironic result, however, is that, as typically occurs with such ad hominem and hyperbolic attacks, the attacker ends up marginalizing himself and galvanizing his intended target (I’m rubber, you’re glue and all that).

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