Anti-Gay Groups Protest SPLC with Claims of Hate and Intolerance
Hateful zealots claim to be victims.
There’s little difference between the message of the Westboro Baptist Church, and that of FRC and AFA. Up until a few years ago, right wing blogs had very little trouble with calling the Phelps clan a hate group and a hate church themselves, but in the post prop 8 world the fundamentalist haters own and direct the religious right, and nobody in the GOP can stand against them. These groups sow fear, lies, and discord where ever they go because for them fear and hate are products — products useful for gaining both votes and money. Meanwhile their megachurch ministries continue to decay as people flee from the intolerance.
About a dozen African American pastors joined anti-gay extremists today in condemning the Southern Poverty Law Center for using its “hate group” label to describe faith-based organizations that demonize the LGBT community, characterizing it as part of an orchestrated liberal plot.
The pastors spoke at a press conference staged outside the SPLC offices in Montgomery, Ala., by Americans for the Truth About Homosexuality (AFTAH), which the SPLC lists as an anti-gay hate group.
“The SPLC has moved from monitoring actual hate groups like the KKK and neo-Nazis to slandering mainstream Christian organizations with that very same hate group label,” said Matt Barber of the Liberty Counsel, affiliated with Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. “By extension, the SPLC is smearing billions of Christians and Jews worldwide as haters simply because they embrace the traditional Judeo-Christian ethics.”
Rachel Conner of Abiding Truth Ministries, also listed as a hate group, charged that “the Southern Poverty Law Center has now become a tool of the God-haters, promoting hatred in the form of vicious lies against Christianity.”
“This has nothing to do with hate and tolerance,” said Peter LaBarbera, president of AFTAH. “It has everything to do with pro-gay politicking.”
In fact, it has everything to do with hate and intolerance.
Mark Potok, editor of the SPLC’s Intelligence Report and this blog, responded to the accusations: “Our listing of anti-gay hate groups is completely unrelated to religion, Christianity or the Bible. These groups are listed because they repeatedly lie in an effort to defame LGBT people, an exercise they’ve been extraordinarily successful at. The idea that we are criticizing these groups because they represent Judeo-Christian morality is simply ludicrous.”
The SPLC does not identify anti-gay hate groups based on their religious views. Instead, the SPLC lists anti-gay groups on the basis of spreading known falsehoods and demonizing propaganda against LGBT people, such as the claim that gay men largely orchestrated the Holocaust.