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Liberal law center demonizes Christian foes of LGBTQ agenda as ‘hate groups’

August 18, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) — In the vast array of leftist lies, one of the most dangerous is that groups and people defending historic Judeo-Christian sexual morality are somehow guilty of "hate." The main perpetrator of that “big lie” these days is the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which has turned smearing and demonizing social conservatives fighting the homosexual-transgender agenda into a very profitable business.

The SPLC is attempting to pull off one of the nastiest and most audacious “bait-and-switch” propaganda coups in history — equating the Christian-conservative led effort to defend biblical morality against the aggressive LGBTQ lobby with vile racists, Neo-Nazis and anti-Semitic extremist groups.

The Birmingham, Alabama-based SPLC’s “hate” campaign is helped along by lazy, biased journalists and online “social justice warriors” who delight in using its past anti-racism credentials to advance the Left's immoral and deviant sex-gender agenda.

CNN lends legitimacy to SPLC

Yesterday, CNN shamefully assisted the SPLC’s bogus “hate” narrative by running a story featuring its “hate map” under the initial headline, “Here are all the active hate groups where you live.” It was accompanied by a graphic of the SPLC’s “hate map” of alleged “hate groups,” which includes, under Illinois, my organization, Americans For Truth About Homosexuality (AFTAH). We have been slandered as an SPLC “hate group” for the last several years.

On the SPLC ‘s Illinois map, AFTAH and other Christian pro-family groups are listed alongside a KKK group, a "white nationalist" outfit, and some affiliates of the Aryan Nations Sadistic Souls MC, another Nazi group. This is the SPLC’s vicious handiwork, treated as “fact” by the media.

After protests by those miscast as “haters,” CNN changed its headline to "The Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of hate groups.”

Similar stories featuring the SPLC’s bogus “hate map” have popped up across the country, including one in the The Boston Globe headlined, “Where hate calls ‘home’ in Massachusetts.”

The following pro-family groups join Americans For Truth in having the distinct “honor” of being lied about by the cunningly deceptive, sleazy and, yes, downright evil SPLC:

Abiding Truth Ministries (Scott Lively)

Alliance Defending Freedom (the SPLC recently attacked Attorney General Jeff Sessions for addressing this group)

American College of Pediatricians (Dr. Michelle Cretella)

American Family Association (Tim Wildmon)

American Vision

Center for Family and Human Rights (C-FAM; Austin Ruse)

Citizens for Community Values

Conservative Republicans of Texas (Dr. Steve Hotze)

Family Research Council (Tony Perkins)

Family Research Institute (Dr. Paul Cameron)

Heterosexuals Organized for a Moral Environment (H.O.M.E.)

Illinois Family Institute

Liberty Counsel (Mat Staver)

Mass Resistance (and its chapters in various states; Brian Camenker)

Mission: America (Linda Harvey)

Pacific Justice Institute (Brad Dacus)

Pass the Salt Ministries (Coach Dave Daubenmire)

Pray in Jesus Name Project (“Chaps” Klingenschmitt)

Public Advocate of the United States (Eugene Delgaudio)

Ruth Institute (Jennifer Roback Morse)

Save California (Randy Thomasson)

Traditional Values Coalition (Andrea Sheldon)

World Congress of Families/Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society (Allan Carlson)
As you can see, this is quite a large group, representing many millions of Americans and including some of the most accomplished and effective pro-family leaders in the United States. Who knew that these great Americans were the moral equivalents of neo-Nazi Stormtroopers and the Ku Klux Klan?

Hating truth

They are not, of course. Not even close. Could it be that leftists who deliberately conflate mere opposition to the LGBTQ agenda — a revolutionary sin movement that has destroyed the sanctity of marriage in the law and is leading the assault on citizens’ right to live according to the dictates of their faith with hatred— are the ones truly guilty of hate-mongering?

Common sense and logic tell us that those who resist a deviant-sex movement that has produced such profound evils as “pregnant men”; perversion-positive “Christianity”; and teaching little children that they can “become” the opposite sex though medical manipulations of their young bodies, are motivated not by malice or bigotry but rather a heartfelt desire to ward off the social destruction that comes from celebrating unnatural behaviors.

There is a popular saying in Christian, pro-family circles today: “Those who hate the truth call truth hate.”

I believe that at some level that is true, because when “journalists” cavalierly repeat politically calculated tripe like the SPLC’s “hate” smear as if it is authoritative and meaningful, they demonstrate contempt for sincere people of faith simply trying to follow God.

Besides, one of the “old school” rules of “fair” journalism is that in covering a cultural debate, you do not rely on one group’s biased characterization of its opponents, to preserve the ideal of a disinterested, neutral news story. Of course, those days are long gone as most media have shorn any pretense of objectivity and are increasingly fanatical cheerleaders for Big Gay and Big Trans. (What’s next, Big Poly?)

Go with the Big Lie

And so we behold a Fourth Estate very much interested and dutiful in advancing the “narrative” of one side of the “culture war” over homosexuality and “transgenderism,” using the noble-sounding cover of “civil rights.” Most media don’t even bother anymore to get viewpoints of the “other side” on this issue, or if they do, it’s often just a token quote to help reporters feel like they’re being fair.

This makes the SPLC’s goal of advancing its bold, pro-LGBT “hate” lie much easier than it should be.

It turns out that the “Big Lie” tactic attributed to Hitler was something he accused “the Jews” of doing in his 1925 autobiography, Mein Kampf, years before he led a demonization- and then genocidal government campaign against them. But history records that the mustached Nazi dictator and his henchmen (most notably Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels) became masters of the tactic, ultimately using it as part of their horrifyingly evil program against Jews, Poles, and other “undesirables.”

Hitler wrote: “For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.”

Today’s leftist liars understand this harsh reality and know that their “end justifies the means” approach toward delegitimizing pro-family conservatives as “hateful” bigots yields big political and cultural dividends — and scares the media away from featuring conservatives in their stories.

So rather than oppose pro-family groups civilly on public-policy issues concerning homosexuality and gender confusion (transgenderism), the Left resorts to a sophisticated version of name-calling. It began in the post-Stonewall ‘70s, as radical “gay” activists held up signs equating prominent religious opponents of organized homosexuality, like Anita Bryant, with Hitler.

From there it went to tarring their foes as “homophobes,” a term invented by pro-“gay” psychologist George Weinberg, who neatly flipped the pathology from homosexual behavior itself to opposing homosexuality.

Ultimately, the SPLC “codified” that Big Lie, as it were, with its “hate-labeling” strategy that preposterously mixes Christian, pro-family groups opposed to the LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer) Lobby with vile neo-Nazis and white race-warriors.

The SPLC claims it is not demonizing moral and religious opposition to homosexuality but only the methods that the above conservative groups use to oppose the LGBTQ movement, but this is an absurd technicality. In another column, I will expose the arbitrariness of the SPLC’s “criteria” for determining which groups belong on its “anti-LGBT” “hate map.”

‘I’m not a hater?’

And yet, despicable as the SPLC’s hate-smear campaign is, it is highly effective. Making the spurious charge against morality-defenders as “haters” is far easier to do in our post-Christian, morally dumbed-down culture than defending oneself against the loaded accusation.

Indeed, forcing conservatives and Christians to plead defensively, “I’m not — ” is part of the SPLC’s propaganda strategy. We have become a society of simplistic slogans, like “Love is love” and “marriage equality.” In such a culture, accusing good-hearted Christians and conservatives of “hating gays” merely because they oppose (very unhealthy) homosexual behavior, “gay marriage” and creating sin-based “rights” is par for the course.

Denying that you are a “hater” when the most powerful forces in society — media, corporations, academia — are matter-of-factly echoing the SPLC smear — is sort of like denying that you beat your wife. You would never beat your wife — you are called to love her sacrificially as Christ loved the Church — but suddenly you are accused of having abused her, by an organization lionized by the press. A cunning, well-funded organization masquerading as a “civil rights” champion whose allegations are repeated far and wide with an air of moral authority and respectability.

Your pleas about the falseness of the outrageous smear are shared by friends (some similarly accused of beating their wives) but together you are drowned out by a chorus of enemies who have won the sympathy of the corrupt media.

Your only hope for justice is that a large and growing army of people — aided by some counter-cultural media leaders — comes to your aid and exposes the hateful slanders and the wicked organization behind them, so that nobody will ever believe its lies again.

This is how we must counter the SPLC’s calculated, cynical “Big Lie” against people of faith who humbly set out to speak truth, in the love of Christ, about one of the most difficult issues of our age.

Next: The shoddy research, irrationality and arbitrariness of the SPLC’s LGBT “hate group” lie.

Real people are being hurt by the left’s New Witch Hunt, and they don’t care

The eventful year of 2016 is over, and as the holiday season approaches and busy schedules perhaps allow a bit more time for some reading, I have an urgent recommendation for you: Get your hands on Mary Eberstadt’s short but powerful book It’s Dangerous to Believe: Religious Freedom and Its Enemies. It’s only 126 pages long—I read it in a few hours—but it lays out succinctly and with beautiful clarity what she calls the battle of the creeds, the war between the Sexual Revolution and traditionalist Christianity that has been waged with increasing sound and fury since the advent of the Pill.

When Eberstadt refers to the targeting of “Christians,” she is of course referring to traditionalist Christians—those who still hold to the two-thousand-year-old teachings on sexuality that Christians have always believed.

This is a distinction that is now necessary. The Sexual Revolution has managed to generate a contingent of religious quislings, “progressive” Christians who have more or less abolished notions of sexual sin but magnanimously want to keep a messiah around to forgive their neighbors of the sins of homophobia and judgementalism. But these Christians are a very new breed. This new “progressive” Christianity is not only less than a century old, but already shrinking—a recent report noted that it is conservative churches that are growing while liberal churches continue to empty out, putting a bit of irony in the claims of so-called progressive Christians that they are “on the right side of history.”

It is worth noting, for a moment, that if Christians with the traditionalist view of sexuality were placed on one side of a scale, and progressive Christians were plopped on the other side, the sheer lopsidedness of the scene would be rather hilarious. On one side, we have everyone from St. Paul to the great Christian martyrs, from Tolkien, Chesterton, and Lewis, to Jonathan Edwards, Augustine of Hippo, and even the liberal Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. On the other side, we have a handful of so-called progressive Christian intellectuals—and who can name any? —who have abandoned two thousand years of Christian teaching, announcing with staggering arrogance that everyone else was wrong. When the weight of history is dropped onto the scales, it lands on the traditionalist side with such force that such progressives are flung into the stratosphere.

But secular progressives and their post-Christian cronies have made such advances because the position of religion in society has been weakened so much in the first place. So-called progressive Christians are really just hybrid heretics, as they do not see themselves as abandoning Christianity, but rather attempting to reconcile our culture’s two warring creeds. To announce loud support for gay unions, the transgender agenda, abortion, and the other secular sacraments while attempting to twist into a theological pretzel that allows one to claim that such beliefs are actually an expression of “Christian love” may seem to be a solution to the problem of “picking a side,” but in reality it makes a mockery of everything Christianity has ever stood for and a fool of the one attempting this oil-and-water cocktail. This is why we often see “progressive” Christians turning on their supposed co-religionists with such fervor—they are virtue-signalling to their secular comrades, and displaying the fierce eagerness that collaborators so often do.

In Eberstadt’s view, there were two main events in recent history that weakened the standing of religion in society: The Catholic priest child abuse scandals and subsequent cover-ups, which dramatically decreased people’s trust in “organized religion,” and 9/11, which made many people feel as if religion was a dangerous and toxic set of beliefs that could, after all, inspire men to fly planes into buildings. The growing creed of secular progressivism responded with its own apostles in the form of the New Atheism movement, led by the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”—Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett. What was new about this atheist movement, it turns out, is that it sounded rather familiar—the child abuse scandal gave the evangelists of New Atheism fodder for all the moral fury and righteous indignation they needed for an anti-religion crusade. The New Atheists, with no sense of irony, began a moral panic: Religion poisons everything. (One of my friends and I used to joke that Hitchens did in fact believe in objective morality, he was simply offended that it predated him.)

This segued nicely into the ongoing demonization of Christians by the sexual revolutionaries. Christians were “homophobes,” “transphobes,” “bigots,” and “haters.” Consider for a moment, Eberstadt pleads with the reader, just how repulsive and ugly it is that millions of people are being convicted by smear campaigns of being hateful without evidence—their Christian beliefs alone are the only proof necessary to prove that they have hate in their heart. Hate, when detached from what any person actually feels, simply becomes a meaningless word. Eberstadt lays out, in careful detail, the absurd but stunning parallels between the ongoing stigmatization of Christians and the witch-hunts of 1600s Massachusetts. Secular progressivism, she reiterates, is a form of religion—and it sees the Christian view of sexuality as an original sin.

In other words, it is not that secular progressives don’t believe in the Devil. It’s just that they believe he happens to be a Christian. It’s not that they don’t believe in saints and sinners, it’s that in their creed, saints and sinners have swapped places: An athlete announcing his homosexuality can get a congratulatory call from the President of the United States, while a pastor renowned for his work combatting human trafficking can be forced to withdraw from offering a prayer at that same president’s inauguration as the result of a smear campaign targeting him for his Christian position on marriage.

Some may find the word “persecution” to be too strong a word to use in describing what is going on today in the West, and Eberstadt recognizes that. She does, however, detail very carefully the type of targeting that is going on: People losing their jobs, losing their businesses, being ostracized in social settings, refused admittance to universities, and finding their right to educate their own children under attack. Secular progressives are even targeting home-schooling while insinuating that Christian parents are a danger to their own children by virtue of the beliefs they teach. This fundamental right—the right of parents to pass their beliefs on to their children—is where most Christians, even those who simply wish to be left in peace, will finally draw the line and join the culture war.

Additionally, Eberstadt lays out the horrors of real, physical persecution that are being inflicted on Christians in Iraq—and asks, pointedly, why our secular progressive leaders do not seem to care. Indeed, there seems to be a backlash against the mere suggestion that Iraqi Christians, who like the Yazidis are often targeted for persecution by both ISIS and Muslims in the refugee camps, be prioritized because they are in the greatest danger. The reason vicious persecution the world round is ignored and escapes mention, while Barack Obama uses National Prayer Breakfasts to berate Christian leaders for historic sins, Eberstadt posits, is because those being persecuted are Christian, and secular progressives have no sympathy for Christians.

In the creed of the secular progressives, everything hinges on sex. Christians can believe, without controversy, that stealing, murder (except for abortion and euthanasia), lying, and swearing are wrong. If sex enters the picture, however, suddenly everything changes. It is for this reason that secular progressives are willing to hurt thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of poor and needy men, women, and children in order to inflict damage on Christian charities that do not agree with them that two men have the right to raise a child simply because they want to. Eberstadt records one heartbroken adoption worker noting that once the Catholic foster system and adoption services were “sued out of existence,” who would take care of the children? The progressive heresy hunters, of course, would have already carried their torches and pitchforks over to the next guilty charity and begun their shrieking anew. The message to Christian charities, lauded for decades even by secular sources for their sterling work with needy children and their mission to serve the poor, is simple: Change your beliefs on sex, or we’ll shut you down. Just as we see with abortion and so many of the other secular sacraments, children can always be sacrificed in the name of sex.

It is worth noting, as Eberstadt does, that this is not a theoretical question. Real people and real children are being hurt badly by this war against Christian charities, carried out by fanatics who would rather deny people life-saving services than agree to disagree on moral beliefs. If Christians are forced out of charity, much of the charitable system will implode, especially since religious people are far more likely to give to charity than secular people are. For example, people who pray every day are 30% more likely to give to a charity than people who do not pray, people who devote time to a spiritual life are 42% more likely to give to charity than those who do not, and interestingly, “people who say that ‘beliefs don’t matter as long as you’re a good person’ are dramatically less likely to give charitably (69% to 86%) and to volunteer (32% to 51%) than people who think that beliefs do matter.” Eberstadt’s chapter detailing the attack on Christian charities, titled “Inquisitors vs. good Works,” makes her book worth reading all by itself.

Eberstadt’s conclusion is a plea for common ground. Feminists and Christians, she points out, have found themselves fighting side by side on issues like pornography, surrogacy, and the objectification of women. It is possible for us to ascribe to the other the best possible motivation, while still disagreeing in the strongest possible terms. But for this to happen, says Eberstadt, the secular progressives must shut down their witch-hunt. They have to halt their demonization of Christians, cease their storming of Christian charities, and stop their attacks on Christian education. “Is the suppression of independent thought,” she asks, “really going to be progressivism’s historical signature?”

It certainly appears that way.