The Southern Poverty Law Center is a hate-based scam that nearly caused me to be murdered
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
I’ll never forget the moment I learned we were on lockdown. It was Aug.15, 2012. My frustration mingled with fear. Trapped on the sixth floor, we knew someone had been shot. We knew we couldn’t leave yet. We knew little else.
While I was missing lunch, a crime scene played out in the office lobby below me. My coworker and friend Leo wasn’t armed, but he had played the quick-thinking and inadvertent hero, disarming a young man on a mission to kill me and as many of my colleagues as possible . The gunman had packed his backpack with ammo and 15 Chick-fil-A sandwiches — later admitting that he had planned to smear them on our lifeless faces as a political statement. Leo took a bullet in the arm but managed to hold the attacker until law enforcement arrived.
I wrote and edited for the Family Research Council , a public advocacy organization that promoted the principles I have cared about since childhood: protecting the family, promoting the dignity of every human life and advocating for religious liberty. It reads like a tagline, but it’s also just what I believed and the way I chose to match my career with my convictions.
I never expected that everyone would celebrate or share my beliefs. But I did expect to be able to discuss and debate these differences without becoming a political target in an act of terrorism, the first conviction under Washington, D.C.’s 2002 Anti-Terrorism Act.
The Southern Poverty Law Center labeled us a 'hate group'
It was the type of violent incident that one could expect a group that purportedly monitors “hate,” like the Southern Poverty Law Center, to notice, research and decry. In fact, we were on the center’s radar but for all the wrong reasons. The assailant acknowledged later in FBI testimony that he had selected our office precisely because the SPLC had labeled my employer a “hate group.”
It has always been easier to smear people rather than wrestle with their ideas. It’s a bully who calls names and spreads lies rather than thoroughly reading a brief’s legal arguments or challenging the rationale underlying a policy proposal. The SPLC has chosen to take the easy path — to intimidate and mislead for raw political power and financial benefit.
For years, former employees revealed, local journalists reported and commentators have lamented: The Southern Poverty Law Center is not what it claims to be. Not a pure-hearted, clear-headed legal advocate for the vulnerable, but rather an obscenely wealthy marketing scheme. For years, the left-wing interest group has used its “hate group” list to promote the fiction that violent neo-Nazis and Christian nonprofits peacefully promoting orthodox beliefs about marriage and sex are indistinguishable. Sometimes, it has apologized to public figures it has smeared, and it recently paid out millions to settle a threatened defamation lawsuit .
The SPLC has its own troubles
These shameful secrets are no longer hidden in shadows. The New York Times , Politico , NPR and a host of other mainstream publications are reporting on the corruption and widening credibility gap. The SPLC dismissed its co-founder in March, and its president has resigned amidst numerous claims of sexual harassment, gender discrimination and racism within the organization — a parade of disgraces that vividly force the conclusion: The SPLC is hollow, rotten and failing at the very virtues it pretends to celebrate.
The criticism comes from many corners. There’s the Current Affairs editor who seems sympathetic to the center’s progressive mission but decries its “hate group” list as an “outright fraud” and a “willful deception designed to scare older liberals into writing checks to the SPLC.”
There’s the retired investigative journalist who helped research and write an eight-part series on the center’s “litany of problems and questionable practices” in the mid-1990s . His Washington Post opinion piece reads with a thinly veiled message: We nearly got a Pulitzer Prize for TELLING YOU SO.
But perhaps most damning of all are the indictments leveled by former employee Bob Moser in The New Yorker . He remembers being welcomed to the “Poverty Palace” and recounts the heart-sinking reality of it all — being “pawns” in a “highly profitable scam.”
Jobs and years have passed, and I work now for Alliance Defending Freedom . ADF ranks among “ the top performing firm(s) " litigating First Amendment cases, according to the Empirical SCOTUS blog, and is the “ Christian legal powerhouse that keeps winning at the Supreme Court ,” according to The Washington Post.
And yes, my new employer has also attracted one of the SPLC’s spurious hate labels . The label easily peels and fades away when one actually does the research and listens to truth before deciding to troll.
I won't be intimidated by the SPLC
If the SPLC thought that its hate would intimidate or silence me and my colleagues, they’re sadly mistaken. I’m lucky — blessed, really — that I didn’t take a bullet for my beliefs back in 2012. But the center’s ugly slander and the gunman’s misguided attack have sharpened my resolve and deepened my faith in my Savior, who commands my destiny and shields me from the schemes of man. The same is true for my colleagues.
Fifty-one years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. fell to an assassin’s bullet. The SPLC pretends to carry his legacy but weaponizes hate labels instead. Unlike SPLC's name-calling, Dr. King’s words and vision stand the test of time. “Injustice anywhere,” he warned , “is a threat to justice everywhere.”
The SPLC, as an institution, has thoroughly disqualified itself as an arbiter of justice. But this country would be a better place if the center’s donors, lawyers and friends would truly believe and apply Dr. King’s legacy — his peaceful pursuit of justice and his love of neighbor.
Jessica Prol Smith is senior news writer and editor for Alliance Defending Freedom.
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It's a good thing I'm incognito or because of how I feel about the SPLC my name could be on their hate list as well.
So if you label something negatively like The FRC as a "hate group" and some radical attempts to act on that label, that means you "caused" the radicals violence as he headline claims? So what if you label a group of people "rapists"? What if you label them an "infestation" and some radical acts on those labels and shoots more than a dozen innocent people? I guess that means you "caused" their murder, right?
You noticed that, did you?
It is an interesting situation. It would seem to me that either they're ALL responsible or NONE of them are responsible.
But that's entirely too reasonable an idea to be accepted in America these days.
Are you unaware that many of the Democrats in Congress are going on and on about what so and so said is to blame for an act of violence they did not participate in? Anyone who doesn't toe the democratic line is accused of inciting the violence. Rather than engage in dialogue with those who disagree with them, they just label them haters and inciters of violence. Then, when anything happens, they blame them for it.
In the case of the FRC, we see an extreme example of this. The SPLC is a left wing hit squad that has little to do with justice. Anyone without a political ax to grind knows the FRC is not a hate group. Yet the SLPC, which used to stand for something, labels them as a hate group and some sucker believes them. Then we get this. So, when the perp says they specifically chose their target because the SPLC painted a target on them, then, yeah, they caused the violence.
The SPLC is one of the more successful conjobs in history. It's essentially scared white liberals into donating millions and millions of dollars into funding the lavish lifestyle of a former Klan lawyer who realized that the real money was to be made on the other side. It's really sort of amusing, liberals scared by the ever growing list of laughable, often imaginary "hate groups" of giving money to an organization that discriminated against its own black employees and sexually harassed it's females. Instead of "fighting the Klan" gullible liberals sent their money to sit in off shore bank accounts or to fund the settlements towards the people the SPLC itself abused. Jim and Tammy Faye Baker could have learned alot from Morris Dees.
It's almost funny till you are reminded the evil that their propaganda can cause, by gullible progressives who take the SPLC seriously and too dumb to realize they are being scammed.
The FRC promotes lies about LGBT people like “one of the primary goals of the homosexual rights movement is to abolish all age of consent laws and to eventually recognize pedophiles as the ‘prophets’ of a new sexual order.” The FRC also supported draconian Ugandan laws pushed by US ’christian’ ‘missionaries’ that proposed that “Individuals or companies that promote LGBT rights would be fined or imprisoned, or both”, as well as a variety of other extreme penalties.
Blaming the SPLC for labelling the FRC a hate group is like blaming a map-maker for the shape of Texas. It is what it is.
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Using quotes from the last century to call a group a "hate group."
So the Democratic Party is a hate group, per the SPLC.
Comments of lies and bullshit
Arglebargle or foofarraw?
So, 1999 it too long ago... Here’s a current example from FRC.org wrt SOGI laws (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity).
1) might as well read blah, blah, blah. It’s just noise
2) is a lie, how does gay marriage or someone being transgendered have any real effect on anyone else?
3) is hysterical. Because they believe one of the 4,000+ fantasies we refer to as religions, they should be allowed to discriminate. How can you be fine with having protection for beliefs, but not fine with having protection from beliefs?
It doesn't....until.....
Until a boy who identifies as a girl wants to use the girls' locker room, where the actual girls are required to undress in front of him or fail their physical education classes.
Other than that, it doesn't.
And frankly, the solution to that problem is to start to treat P.E. like a real class instead of something for the football coach to do during the day until practice starts. You know....move it out of 1950 and into the digital age where we teach kids how to eat right and use their Fitbits while assigning workouts for homework.
But that won't happen, because public schools are first and foremost about "we've done it this way since 1924".
Ah. That must mean I'm right again.