Liberal law center demonizes Christian foes of LGBTQ agenda as ‘hate groups’
Peter LaBarbera
LIFESITE NEWS
August 18, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) — In the vast array of leftist lies, one of the most dangerous is that groups and people defending historic Judeo-Christian sexual morality are somehow guilty of “hate.” The main perpetrator of that “big lie” these days is the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which has turned smearing and demonizing social conservatives fighting the homosexual-transgender agenda into a very profitable business.
The SPLC is attempting to pull off one of the nastiest and most audacious “bait-and-switch” propaganda coups in history — equating the Christian-conservative led effort to defend biblical morality against the aggressive LGBTQ lobby with vile racists, Neo-Nazis and anti-Semitic extremist groups.
The Birmingham, Alabama-based SPLC’s “hate” campaign is helped along by lazy, biased journalists and online “social justice warriors” who delight in using its past anti-racism credentials to advance the Left’s immoral and deviant sex-gender agenda.
CNN lends legitimacy to SPLC
Yesterday, CNN shamefully assisted the SPLC’s bogus “hate” narrative by running a story featuring its “hate map” under the initial headline, “Here are all the active hate groups where you live.” It was accompanied by a graphic of the SPLC’s “hate map” of alleged “hate groups,” which includes, under Illinois, my organization, Americans For Truth About Homosexuality (AFTAH). We have been slandered as an SPLC “hate group” for the last several years.
On the SPLC ‘s Illinois map, AFTAH and other Christian pro-family groups are listed alongside a KKK group, a “white nationalist” outfit, and some affiliates of the Aryan Nations Sadistic Souls MC, another Nazi group. This is the SPLC’s vicious handiwork, treated as “fact” by the media.
After protests by those miscast as “haters,” CNN changed its headline to “The Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of hate groups.”
Similar stories featuring the SPLC’s bogus “hate map” have popped up across the country, including one in the The Boston Globe headlined, “Where hate calls ‘home’ in Massachusetts.”
The following pro-family groups join Americans For Truth in having the distinct “honor” of being lied about by the cunningly deceptive, sleazy and, yes, downright evil SPLC:
Abiding Truth Ministries (Scott Lively)
Alliance Defending Freedom (the SPLC recently attacked Attorney General Jeff Sessions for addressing this group)
American College of Pediatricians (Dr. Michelle Cretella)
American Family Association (Tim Wildmon)
American Vision
Center for Family and Human Rights (C-FAM; Austin Ruse)
Citizens for Community Values
Conservative Republicans of Texas (Dr. Steve Hotze)
Family Research Council (Tony Perkins)
Family Research Institute (Dr. Paul Cameron)
Heterosexuals Organized for a Moral Environment (H.O.M.E.)
Illinois Family Institute
Liberty Counsel (Mat Staver)
Mass Resistance (and its chapters in various states; Brian Camenker)
Mission: America (Linda Harvey)
Pacific Justice Institute (Brad Dacus)
Pass the Salt Ministries (Coach Dave Daubenmire)
Pray in Jesus Name Project (“Chaps” Klingenschmitt)
Public Advocate of the United States (Eugene Delgaudio)
Ruth Institute (Jennifer Roback Morse)
Save California (Randy Thomasson)
Traditional Values Coalition (Andrea Sheldon)
World Congress of Families/Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society (Allan Carlson)
As you can see, this is quite a large group, representing many millions of Americans and including some of the most accomplished and effective pro-family leaders in the United States. Who knew that these great Americans were the moral equivalents of neo-Nazi Stormtroopers and the Ku Klux Klan?
Hating truth
They are not, of course. Not even close. Could it be that leftists who deliberately conflate mere opposition to the LGBTQ agenda — a revolutionary sin movement that has destroyed the sanctity of marriage in the law and is leading the assault on citizens’ right to live according to the dictates of their faith with hatred— are the ones truly guilty of hate-mongering?
Common sense and logic tell us that those who resist a deviant-sex movement that has produced such profound evils as “pregnant men”; perversion-positive “Christianity”; and teaching little children that they can “become” the opposite sex though medical manipulations of their young bodies, are motivated not by malice or bigotry but rather a heartfelt desire to ward off the social destruction that comes from celebrating unnatural behaviors.
There is a popular saying in Christian, pro-family circles today: “Those who hate the truth call truth hate.”
I believe that at some level that is true, because when “journalists” cavalierly repeat politically calculated tripe like the SPLC’s “hate” smear as if it is authoritative and meaningful, they demonstrate contempt for sincere people of faith simply trying to follow God.
Besides, one of the “old school” rules of “fair” journalism is that in covering a cultural debate, you do not rely on one group’s biased characterization of its opponents, to preserve the ideal of a disinterested, neutral news story. Of course, those days are long gone as most media have shorn any pretense of objectivity and are increasingly fanatical cheerleaders for Big Gay and Big Trans. (What’s next, Big Poly?)
Go with the Big Lie
And so we behold a Fourth Estate very much interested and dutiful in advancing the “narrative” of one side of the “culture war” over homosexuality and “transgenderism,” using the noble-sounding cover of “civil rights.” Most media don’t even bother anymore to get viewpoints of the “other side” on this issue, or if they do, it’s often just a token quote to help reporters feel like they’re being fair.
This makes the SPLC’s goal of advancing its bold, pro-LGBT “hate” lie much easier than it should be.
It turns out that the “Big Lie” tactic attributed to Hitler was something he accused “the Jews” of doing in his 1925 autobiography, Mein Kampf, years before he led a demonization- and then genocidal government campaign against them. But history records that the mustached Nazi dictator and his henchmen (most notably Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels) became masters of the tactic, ultimately using it as part of their horrifyingly evil program against Jews, Poles, and other “undesirables.”
Hitler wrote: “For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.”
Today’s leftist liars understand this harsh reality and know that their “end justifies the means” approach toward delegitimizing pro-family conservatives as “hateful” bigots yields big political and cultural dividends — and scares the media away from featuring conservatives in their stories.
So rather than oppose pro-family groups civilly on public-policy issues concerning homosexuality and gender confusion (transgenderism), the Left resorts to a sophisticated version of name-calling. It began in the post-Stonewall ‘70s, as radical “gay” activists held up signs equating prominent religious opponents of organized homosexuality, like Anita Bryant, with Hitler.
From there it went to tarring their foes as “homophobes,” a term invented by pro-“gay” psychologist George Weinberg, who neatly flipped the pathology from homosexual behavior itself to opposing homosexuality.
Ultimately, the SPLC “codified” that Big Lie, as it were, with its “hate-labeling” strategy that preposterously mixes Christian, pro-family groups opposed to the LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer) Lobby with vile neo-Nazis and white race-warriors.
The SPLC claims it is not demonizing moral and religious opposition to homosexuality but only the methods that the above conservative groups use to oppose the LGBTQ movement, but this is an absurd technicality. In another column, I will expose the arbitrariness of the SPLC’s “criteria” for determining which groups belong on its “anti-LGBT” “hate map.”
‘I’m not a hater?’
And yet, despicable as the SPLC’s hate-smear campaign is, it is highly effective. Making the spurious charge against morality-defenders as “haters” is far easier to do in our post-Christian, morally dumbed-down culture than defending oneself against the loaded accusation.
Indeed, forcing conservatives and Christians to plead defensively, “I’m not … ” is part of the SPLC’s propaganda strategy. We have become a society of simplistic slogans, like “Love is love” and “marriage equality.” In such a culture, accusing good-hearted Christians and conservatives of “hating gays” merely because they oppose (very unhealthy) homosexual behavior, “gay marriage” and creating sin-based “rights” is par for the course.
Denying that you are a “hater” when the most powerful forces in society — media, corporations, academia — are matter-of-factly echoing the SPLC smear — is sort of like denying that you beat your wife. You would never beat your wife — you are called to love her sacrificially as Christ loved the Church — but suddenly you are accused of having abused her, by an organization lionized by the press. A cunning, well-funded organization masquerading as a “civil rights” champion whose allegations are repeated far and wide with an air of moral authority and respectability.
Your pleas about the falseness of the outrageous smear are shared by friends (some similarly accused of beating their wives) but together you are drowned out by a chorus of enemies who have won the sympathy of the corrupt media.
Your only hope for justice is that a large and growing army of people — aided by some counter-cultural media leaders — comes to your aid and exposes the hateful slanders and the wicked organization behind them, so that nobody will ever believe its lies again.
This is how we must counter the SPLC’s calculated, cynical “Big Lie” against people of faith who humbly set out to speak truth, in the love of Christ, about one of the most difficult issues of our age.
Next: The shoddy research, irrationality and arbitrariness of the SPLC’s LGBT “hate group” lie.