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Conservative Groups Respond to Getting Left Off SPLC ‘Hate Map’
The Southern Poverty Law Center released its annual list of “hate groups” and “antigovernment extremist groups” Tuesday, and many conservatives say they are disappointed to be left out.
As I wrote in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC has squandered its credibility on hate. It gained its reputation by suing the Ku Klux Klan into bankruptcy, but it took the program it used to monitor the Klan and weaponized it to smear conservative and Christian groups as “hate groups,” placing them on a map with Klan chapters.
The SPLC is currently facing a defamation lawsuit that has made it to the discovery process. A former employee called this a “highly profitable scam,” and some conservatives consider landing on the SPLC’s “hate map” to be a badge of honor.
The “hate map” includes many prominent organizations, such as Alliance Defending Freedom, which has won multiple Supreme Court cases; Moms for Liberty, which has mobilized a parental rights movement across the country; prominent immigration groups such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform and the Center for Immigration Studies; and many more.
Some of these organizations advised Donald Trump when he was president, a fact the SPLC uses to smear Trump while still suggesting these are fringe “hate” and “antigovernment” groups—because they oppose the SPLC’s agenda on education, LGBTQ issues, immigration, or other causes.
Rabbi Yaakov Menken, managing director of the Coalition for Jewish Values, which represents more than 2,000 Orthodox Jewish rabbis in American public policy, quipped that he was crestfallen to see the latest “hate map.”
“I called it last year—in a speech before Moms for Liberty, I mentioned they were added, and I said I’m very offended,” Menken told The Daily Signal on Wednesday. “CJV also supports parental rights, traditional values, and religious liberty, so why won’t they list us as a hate group?”
The New Tolerance Campaign, a group that calls for equal standards of tolerance in opposition to the woke agenda, is also conspicuously absent from the SPLC’s “hate map.”
““The SPLC’s hate and extremist lists have included a group that argued cases before the Supreme Court, an Irving Kristol Award winner, and a brain surgeon who later became a Cabinet secretary,” New Tolerance Campaign President Gregory Angelo told The Daily Signal in a statement Wednesday. “It’s clear the New Tolerance Campaign needs to step up our game if we have any hope of making the cut next year.”
Angelo was referring to Alliance Defending Freedom, the scholar Charles Murray, and neurosurgeon Ben Carson, who became secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 2017. Although Murray and Carson don’t appear on the “hate map,” the SPLC had put both men on its “extremist list.” (The SPLC removed Carson from the list in 2015.)
While Angelo noted the prominence of SPLC targets, others mentioned the fact that the organization’s “hate map” inspired an act of domestic terrorism.
“Southern Poverty Law Center’s actions have resulted in acts of domestic terrorism, yet this extremist group sanctimoniously claims to know what ‘hate’ is? What a pathetic joke,” Penny Nance, CEO and president of Concerned Women for America, told The Daily Signal on Wednesday.
“CWA has been in SPLC’s crosshairs in the past but it seems they are incapable of keeping track of all the Americans who believe in God, faith, family and in our constitutional principles,” Nance said. “We are still the majority in the country, no matter how hard SPLC tries to slander and shame us.”
Nance was referring to a shooting in 2012. A terrorist targeted Family Research Council, a conservative Christian nonprofit in Washington, D.C., for a mass shooting after finding the group on the SPLC “hate map.” The building manager foiled the terrorist’s plan, but was shot and wounded in the process. The SPLC condemned the attack but has kept Family Research Council on its “hate map” ever since.
The SPLC repeatedly has attacked Concerned Women for America as “anti-gay” since 2010, but has never put the group on the “hate map.”
Jennifer Lahl, founder of the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network, noted that prominent critics of gender ideology such as herself have landed on the “hate map.”
The SPLC’s 2023 “hate map,” released Tuesday, includes organizations of doctors who oppose experimental transgender medical interventions euphemistically referred to as “gender-affirming care.” The doctor groups Do No Harm, Genspect, Partners for Ethical Care, and the Society for Evidence-Based Medicine, or SEGM, appear on the “hate map.”
“It is very confusing to me who the SPLC selects to be targeted as hate groups on their map,” Lahl told The Daily Signal. “What is their exact selection criteria?”
“Our organization has produced three documentaries focused on the debate around medicalizing those who feel as if they might have been born in the wrong body,” Lahl said. “Our book ‘The Detransition Diaries‘ highlights the history of the scandal of ‘gender affirmation therapy’ and dares to allow those who have detransitioned to have a platform to speak and tell their stories.”
“Perhaps we have flown under the radar and need to make much more noise calling medical professionals to account so we can get our badge of honor,” she added. “I would be happy to be included within the ranks of SEGM, Genspect, and Do No Harm.”
These conservatives consider the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “hate map” to be a joke and inclusion on it to be something like a badge of honor, but the Biden administration doesn’t appear to be laughing. SPLC leaders and staff have visited the White House at least 18 times under Biden, and multiple federal agencies—including the DOJ and Department of Education—have taken briefings on “hate” from the smear group.
The Biden administration should realize what these conservatives have long known—the SPLC’s “hate map” is little more than a partisan tool of defamation and fundraising. It is a laughingstock, and it became worse when the SPLC put an openly gay group on the list of “anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups.”
Sadly, it seems the administration has no sense of humor.
The post Conservative Groups Respond to Getting Left Off SPLC ‘Hate Map’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.
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