The Southern Poverty Law Center: Smearing conservatives, raking in cash

In "Smearing Conservatives, Raking in Cash" in FrontPage today, Matthew Vadum exposes the SPLC as a money and defamation machine for the Left. The mainstream media aids and abets this by citing the SPLC as if it were a reputable source, when actually it richly deserves its place on AFDI's Threats to Freedom Index.

And even worse than the SPLC are the conservative columnists, pundits and bloggers who ignore any figure in the counter-jihad movement whom the Left has targeted for smearing. This kind of cowardliness never wins wars.

After the Southern Poverty Law Center – a quarter-billion dollar leftist attack machine funded by George Soros – labeled the conservative Family Research Council a “hate group,” a gay rights activist shot up FRC headquarters in Washington, D.C. last week.

FRC president Tony Perkins acknowledged “the gunman is responsible for the shooting,” but blamed the SPLC for “recklessly” labeling groups “like FRC that they disagree with as ‘hate groups,’ that created this hostile environment.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s behavior isn’t reckless as such. It’s far worse than that. It is calculated and malicious, intended to foment hatred and raise oceans of cash by bamboozling gullible liberals into giving money to what is one of the wealthiest nonprofit groups in the history of the United States.

The paranoid conspiracy theorists of the SPLC deliberately conflate conservative groups with genuinely extremist groups such as the infamous Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church, another SPLC-designated hate group. In declaring FRC a hate group, it asserts that FRC is the moral equivalent of other SPLC-classified hate groups such as the Aryan Brotherhood, Nation of Islam, and New Black Panther Party. Even liberal Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank calls it “absurd” for SPLC to place FRC “in the same category as Aryan Nations, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Stormfront and the Westboro Baptist Church.”

FRC is trying to change American culture just as SPLC is trying to push the culture in a different direction. Most Americans would say the two groups have a difference of opinion. SPLC, which pretends to champion “tolerance,” doesn’t see it this way and routinely smears FRC as a hate group in order to discredit it and the ideas it stands for.

Put another way, SPLC attacks the Family Research Council because the latter is opposed to homosexuality.

Period.

Every other complaint SPLC generates about FRC is a mere detail emanating from this central truth. To SPLC founder Morris Dees and his followers those who do not approve of homosexuality are guilty of hate, or if you prefer, thought crime. It follows that those who oppose same-sex marriage are also guilty of hate even though every time the question has been put on the ballot anywhere in the United States – even in irretrievably liberal California— Americans have voted same-sex marriage down. America, it turns out, is guilty of hate.

But SPLC is selective in singling out anti-gay “hate” groups. The Center ignores many Muslim organizations that are violently opposed to homosexuality. Instead the group attacks people like David Horowitz, Pamela Geller, and Robert Spencer who worry about the threat that radical Islamists pose to America, accusing them of anti-Muslim bigotry for daring to speak out.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has been at this game a long time, making money by smearing conservatives. It is so fabulously wealthy that it stashes money in Bermuda and the Cayman Islands, two of those tax haven countries the Left keeps complaining about. In addition to those foreign accounts, in its most recent publicly available tax return the SPLC discloses an absolutely astounding $238.1 million in net assets....

Read it all.