Anti-LGBT Groups Absolutely Deserve Their ‘Hate Group’ Designations
This week, the Associated Press profiled the Liberty Counsel, the conservative legal group representing Kim Davis, but was far from charitable. It opened with a recent incident where their chairman, Mat Staver, falsely claimed that 100,000 people rallied in Peru to support his most famous client. It then cast doubt on the group’s account of a meeting between Davis and Pope Francis. The title of the piece referred to Liberty Counsel’s designation as a “hate group,” a label the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) first gave it over a year ago.
The new “hate group” press prompted swift outcry from both the Liberty Counsel and other anti-LGBT groups that share the designation. In a press release on its website, the Liberty Counsel attacked the SPLC and claimed that it only called them a hate group for their political positions on same-sex marriage, hate crimes laws, and ex-gay therapy. “The SPLC’s false labeling of people or organizations would mean that every civilization and its people and every major religious denomination would be similarly labeled by the SPLC as a hater or hate group,” the group wrote. “It is SPLC that demonizes good people and organizations and spews false accusations against those with whom it disagrees. The SPLC is reckless and its false labels are dangerous.”
The Family Research Council (FRC), itself a hate group, also came to Liberty Counsel’s defense. FRC has long blamed the SPLC’s “hate group” labeling for the actions of a shooter who targeted FRC because of its anti-LGBT rhetoric, an accusation the Liberty Counsel repeated. FRC insists that SPLC “inspired” the shooting, and this week claimed that “despite the SPLC’s agenda of intimidation, the media is using the organization to bludgeon Liberty Counsel and Kim Davis. But instead of exposing any wrongdoing on their part, the media is only exposing its own hostility toward Christians. Which sadly, only furthers the extremism that’s silencing religious freedom in the first place.”
But these groups’ strategy of downplaying the SPLC’s “hate group” criteria — while implying that all Christians share their radically anti-LGBT beliefs — requires ignoring exactly what evidence the SPLC uses. Indeed, it is an attempt to completely whitewash the dangerous rhetoric these groups promote, false information that fuels discrimination and often deadly violence against the LGBT community.
http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2015/10/09/3710468/liberty-counsel-hate-group/
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