Is SPLC a 'Hate Group'?

The left's über race-baiter Mark Potok of SPLC responds to the Family Research Council, "SPLC: Family Research Council License-to-Kill Claim ‘Outrageous’" (at Memeorandum):

... FRC President Tony Perkins attacked the SPLC, saying it had encouraged and enabled the attack [on the Council's headquarters] by labeling the FRC a “hate group.” The attacker, Floyd Corkins, “was given a license to shoot an unarmed man by organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center,” Perkins said. “I believe the Southern Poverty Law Center should be held accountable for their reckless use of terminology.”

Perkins’ accusation is outrageous. The SPLC has listed the FRC as a hate group since 2010 because it has knowingly spread false and denigrating propaganda about LGBT people — not, as some claim, because it opposes same-sex marriage. The FRC and its allies on the religious right are saying, in effect, that offering legitimate and fact-based criticism in a democratic society is tantamount to suggesting that the objects of criticism should be the targets of criminal violence.

The gentleman doth protest too much (and apologies to the noun "gentlemen").

Labeling every single person or group you disagree with on policy grounds is not "fact-based criticism." It's demonization, which is why SPLC is under fire for giving cover to hate.

Here's your hate, on steroids: "Depraved Homosexuals Blame Family Research Council for 'Climate of Violence' After Leftist Attempts Massacre."

More from Jonathan Tobin, at Commentary, "After DC Attack, Law Center Deserves Flak":

After holding off on making any statement about the shooting attack on his group’s Washington headquarters by a critic of their positions on social issues, the Family Research Center’s Tony Perkins spoke out today and placed at least some of the blame for the incident on the Southern Poverty Law Center, a generally respected liberal watchdog group. This will come as a shock to many whose knowledge of the SPLC comes from the good press it gets for its work over the years monitoring extremist hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan. But in recent years, they have expanded their definition of a hate group to include not just the likes of David Duke and neo-Nazis but non-violent conservative advocacy groups. While the SPLC says it condemns violence, their actions have placed a bull’s eye on groups it dislikes and rendered them vulnerable to intimidation.

According to the SPLC’s way of thinking groups like the Family Research Center that oppose abortion and gay marriage are pretty much the moral equivalent of the Klan. Shockingly, the SPLC also lists on their website’s roster of haters people like Washington think tanker Frank Gaffney because of his position on the threat from Islamist terror groups like the Muslim Brotherhood which they interpret as a form of Islamophobia. Indeed, Gaffney is listed on the SPLC’s website on a roster of profile of hatemongers such as Louis Farrakhan and a leader of a white nationalist militia. While one may disagree with the Family Research Council’s religious conservatism or Gaffney’s ideas about the threat from shariah law, the idea that they deserve to be placed in such a context is outrageous. In doing so, they are also responsible for creating an atmosphere in which those who take such positions are to be intimidated into silence. Yesterday’s events ought to cause the Law Center to rethink its irresponsible labeling of political opponents.

The Law Center gained a certain degree of fame and respectability as a more secular counterpart to the Anti-Defamation League, which also monitors hate groups from a Jewish perspective. But the SLC seems to have made a strategic decision in recent years that it might be easier to raise money if it increased its scope from activities monitoring genuine hate groups to advocates of causes that they dislike like such as the Family Research Center who are deeply unpopular among liberal donors.

Recently, the Law Center has also taken up the largely bogus charge that America is suffering from a wave of Islamophobia. In doing so, it put Gaffney in their cross hairs and has now taken to treating the former Reagan administration Defense Department official as being no different than David Duke or Farrakhan. Just as outrageous is that, as Lori Lowenthal Marcus writes in the Jewish Press today, they have teamed up with the likes of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) and the Center for American Progress (CAP) to support the branding not just Gaffney but scholar Daniel Pipes and his Middle East Forum and investigative journalist Steven Emerson as part of a network of hate against Muslims. Again, one needn’t agree with Gaffney, Pipes or Emerson on every position they take, but the idea that they can be treated like KKK members is a frightening example of the way the left operates these days...

Well said. And Tobin goes on to note the irony of the SPLC allying with genuinely hateful groups like the Center for American Progress, which has been roundly criticized by Jewish organizations for its reprehensible anti-Semitism. But as Tobin points out, that's the way it is on the left nowadays. The SPLC, by its own logic, could be smeared as a "hate group."

And here's David Sessions at the left-wing Daily Beast, "Is the Family Research Council Really a Hate Group?":

Conservatives were outraged when the SPLC revised its list of hate groups in 2010, adding the Family Research Council and the American Family Association. The shooting on Wednesday brought the ire flooding back, as conservative journalists and bloggers insisted that the SPLC is the true hate group. Maggie Gallagher, the president of the National Organization for Marriage, linked to a 2010 article that quoted a SPLC research director saying her group sees no difference between anti-gay evangelical groups and white supremacists. “Trying to lump Tony Perkins with the guy who shot people at the Sikh temple is morally bankrupt on its face,” Gallagher wrote.

William Jacobson, a professor at Cornell Law School and author of the conservative blog Legal Insurrection, has attacked the SPLC for, in his view, expanding its focus to include more mainstream conservative political groups as well as racist groups. On Wednesday, Jacobson repeated the implication that the SPLC’s designation of the Family Research Council as a hate group is based on FRC’s opposition to gay marriage. “SPLC gave cover to those who use the ‘hate speech’ and ‘hate group’ labels to shut down political and religious speech, and now it has spiraled out of control,” Jacobson wrote.

There is no doubt that Perkins, the Family Research Council, and other conservatives are deploying the shooting to score political points. But they have raised a substantive concern that defies a simple answer, especially in a situation fraught with political and religious tension: which organizations can fairly be called hate groups? Can a word like “hate,” packed with visceral connotations, be part of a civilized debate about a public-policy issue?

More at the link.

Even Brian Levin, of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at CSU San Bernardino, cited by Sessions, rejects the "hate group" designation for FRC.

Tony Perkins comments are seen at the video here, "Before Shooting: Southern Poverty Law Center Put Family Research Council on ‘Hate Map’."

IMAGE CREDIT: Digger's Realm, "Hate and Slander For Profit - Part 1."