The Southern Poverty Law Center hates parents

Editorials
The Southern Poverty Law Center hates parents
Editorials
The Southern Poverty Law Center hates parents
A sign containing the logo of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
By making their case to the press, these conservatives are wisely appealing to the SPLC’s most powerful source of influence.

The
Southern Poverty Law Center,
a radical, leftist, self-appointed watchdog against “hate,” has itself become a hate group.

Its
annual report
and “
hate map
” labeling and listing “hate groups” across the country once were semi-respectable and semi-valuable compendia on KKK, neo-Nazi, virulent Islamist, and extremist militia organizations. Years ago, though, the SPLC lists became utterly discreditable and disreputable. Rather than limiting its emotionally powerful “hate” designations to groups promoting violence, the SPLC began lumping mainstream conservative groups in with white supremacist associations that were depraved and dangerous.


SPLC ‘HATE GROUP’ LABELING OF CONSERVATIVE GROUPS GETS LEGAL SCRUTINY

Now the SPLC has reached a new low, perhaps a nadir. It maliciously identified hundreds of local chapters of three parental rights organizations as “hate groups.”

The perilous power of the “hate” label became clear in 2012 when a gunman
motivated by the SPLC’s list
opened fire on workers at the offices of the Family Research Council, a group promoting traditional values, and planned attacks on other conservative groups listed by the SPLC. Against well-deserved criticism, the SPLC has continued to attack right-leaning people such as
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
, the famed human rights activist and scholar, and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and organizations such as the Center for Immigration Studies, which provides research solid enough that its leader has been invited to testify to Congress more than 100 times.

The SPLC even bad-listed famed children’s neurosurgeon Ben Carson. Later, in semi-apology, it nevertheless continued to insist Carson was guilty of numerous “extrem[ist]” comments, such as opposing gay marriage. This was in 2013, just a year after President Barack Obama had abandoned the same view. Carson was also subjected to SPLC calumny because he said, “Citizens should be able to own weapons, [and] they should not have to report what weapons they own.”

Now
the SPLC has outdone itself
, amping up its own hatred for anyone who won’t kowtow to radical ideology. The parent groups it denounces are participating in serious civic action for the first time. They are not haters. They love their children sufficiently to want to bring them up well. The SPLC report lumps them all into the supposedly dangerous category of “
Antigovernment General
,” which supposedly consists of “the antidemocratic hard-right movement.”

That’s an odd way to describe groups of parents who exercise free speech rights at open school board meetings and who work through the democratic process to elect board members of their liking.
Moms for Liberty
, perhaps the most prominent of the groups, with more than 100,000 members in 275 local chapters, all formed since COVID-19 restrictions began in 2020, was co-founded by two women who served as elected local school board members. Its “director of national engagement” is a
black, formerly homeless woman
with an autistic child upset by mask mandates.

The new SPLC report complained the new plethora of parent rights groups has attacked a book titled Gender Queer, which is full of explicit sexual content. It is pornography.

It is not as though SPLC objects in principle to outsiders trying to influence what children are taught. The SPLC itself produces
curricula
for preschool children that promote power struggles for “social justice” and devotes page after page on its website to the pernicious — hateful — notion that collective traits called “
whiteness
” are malignant forces that must be battled and extirpated.


CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Under color of “tolerance,” this is racial hatred, pure and simple.

For targeting parents, conservatives, centrists, and white people, black people such as Carson and Ali who dare to oppose its radical line, the Southern Poverty Law Center is, in the common understanding of the phrase, a hate group. All good people, and all media sources, should ostracize it.

Share your thoughts with friends.

Related Content

Related Content