Hate, And Hate Some More

By DEACON MIKE MANNO

You would think that groups like the Ku Klux Klan, the Skinheads, Neo-Nazis, and white supremacists organizations could easily be categorized as hate groups. And if you think that way you are probably right.
And if you have any doubts about that, there is an organization whose purpose is to identify them. In fact, the organization is so pervasive in its reach that the FBI, the Department of Justice, and newsrooms around the country rely upon it as the definitive word on an entity’s hate status. That group is the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), and it has built up a good business making hate pay — for itself that is.
Now if you go to the SPLC website you can find its famous Hate Map which shows you the location of nearly every group that it finds to be hateful. The problem with the map is that besides including those recognized hate groups I’ve mentioned above, you’ll find a number of very ordinary citizen, religious, and legal groups that are also listed as things of hate.
For example, there are dozens of parent groups, such as Moms For Liberty, who are listed as anti-LBGTQ. Of course you know the story, it’s not because they hate anyone, it is because they do not want their children indoctrinated into the LGBTQ culture by the teachers unions that run their kids’ schools. So what one side might see as parents protecting their children another sees it as a group of haters with an animas against gay/lesbian and bisexual people.
Of course, that is not exactly how a neutral observer might describe the clash; not as people who engender hate, but people with different ideas about who should control their child’s cultural upbringing, and how and what should be taught at each level of a child’s development. For example, a six-year-old is not sufficiently cognizant to understand the depth of sexual roles, but a sixteen-year-old probably is.
But when someone points out that the moms’ group is listed as a hate group, far too many members of local newsrooms check out that hate map and report that the moms have been identified as haters. I wonder if that is the reporters’ natural inclination or if it is just laziness. Having been a reporter once, I tend to think that it’s probably a combination of both.
But let’s go back to that natural inclination part and try to apply it to the SPLC. As we do that let me add a few others that appear on that hate map:
The Alliance Defending Freedom, one of the premier legal groups fighting for religious liberties, parental rights, and free speech.
Ditto the Pacific Justice Institute and Liberty Counsel, who along with others have an outstanding history of representing churches, parents, and small businesses against Godless demands that they reject their own heritages and follow a path they find that violates their consciences or is, in fact, downright evil.
How do you suppose they ended up on the map? It’s simple, it is because the SPLC, like the vast majority of activist left-wing organizations, refuses to believe that anyone could in good faith disagree with their rock-solid ideology. The result is the natural inclination of the left to shut-up the right because as everyone knows, the right is always wrong and has no right to spout its hateful ideas.
The next problem, of course, is that federal law enforcement believes that the SPLC is a valuable aid to assist it in protecting the country from the white supremacists and domestic terrorists who want to destroy our schools and, perhaps, overthrow the government. Thus, part of the FBI’s investigation of traditional Catholics who attend the Latin Mass relied on information from the SPLC. An FBI whistleblower that appeared on my radio program admitted as much.
So how did this group gather so much influence?
It was founded in 1971 during the height of the civil rights movement in Montgomery, Ala., by Morris Dees, Joseph Levin, and Julian Bond. During that time period it developed a strategy for enforcing anti-discrimination laws and protecting civil rights by aggressive civil litigation and the resultant monetary damages that followed its victories.
It went after the Ku Klux Klan, as well as other notorious civil rights violators and became a respected civil rights organization. In 1987 it won a case against the United Klans of America for the lynching of a black teenager, by holding the organization liable for the crimes of its members. The resultant $7 million judgment forced the United Klans into bankruptcy. It had similar legal victories against the Aryan Nation, and the White Aryan Resistance.
However, the group expanded its activity to include investigations into political topics such as immigration and church-state relations. Since the 1990s the group had been issuing its annual list of hate groups which included those you would expect to be there, but more recently it has included pro-life groups, pro traditional marriage/Christian organizations as anti-LGBTQ hate groups.
It also underwent a leadership turnover in 2019 when it was forced to fire Dees over “allegations of mistreatment, sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and racism” which overshadowed the moral authority of the organization. Since then it seems that the SPLC has excelled its leftward march to the point where any group not kowtowing to the Left’s political agenda risked inclusion on the hate map.
The problem here is not that the SPLC has lost credibility, but that it hasn’t. Those folks who need an official imprimatur for their ad hominem attacks against their opponents find the SPLC a friendly venue, as do journalists who are more interested in making a point rather than telling the full story, as well as cheap law enforcement officials wanting to make an easy, pre-determined case.
The red flags are all over this left-wing propaganda machine. You should read anything that it originates or supports with a grain of salt. It has an agenda and a following. In today’s political climate that’s all you need to create havoc. If you don’t believe me, ask any attorney working on behalf of religious liberty, or better yet, one of those moms trying to protect their kids from sexual indoctrination in their schools.
(You can reach Mike at: DeaconMike@q.com, and listen to him every weekend on Faith On Trial or podcast at https://iowacatholicradio.com/faith-on-trial/.)