I book marked a statement by the Southern Poverty Law Center late last week which addressed the disingenuous crocodile tears of the newly registered hate groups such as Family Research Council, but in the flurry following DADT repeal and four nights of holiday parties (including a dinner party at our home tonight), I never got around to addressing it. The SPLC statement lays out the justification as to why organizations received the "hate group" label - something the liars and hypocrites at FRC and similar groups have refused to address. In addition to the SPLC statement, Jeremy Hooper also has a good summary of the lies and deliberate hatred disseminated by these organizations which earned them the hate group label. First, some highlights from the SPLC statement:*
This morning, 22 members of Congress and a large number of other conservatives signed on to a public statement attacking the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) for listing several anti-gay religious right organizations as hate groups.
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It was a remarkable performance, given that it was precisely the maligning of entire groups of people — gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered people — that caused the SPLC to list groups like the FRC. Remarkable, too, was the accusation that the SPLC was avoiding debate — in fact, the very first public discussion of the issues raised by the SPLC came in a Nov. 29 debate between the FRC’s Tony Perkins and myself on MSNBC’s “Hardball With Chris Matthews.”
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Consider a few of the comments about gays and lesbians that have come from some of the groups now denouncing character assassination. The FRC, in a booklet entitled Homosexual Activists Work to Normalize Sex With Boys, has claimed that “one of the primary goals of the homosexual rights movement is to abolish all age of consent laws and to eventually recognize pedophiles as the ‘prophets’ of a new sexual order.” The American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer wrote this year that “[h]omosexuality gave us Adolph Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine and 6 million dead Jews.” Matt Barber of Liberty Counsel, which was not listed by the SPLC but helped organize today’s newspaper ad, describes relationships between gay men as “one man violently cramming his penis into another man’s lower intestine and calling it ‘love.’” Officials of several, including the FRC, have called for criminalizing gay sex.
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Almost all the religious-right groups named by the SPLC also have engaged in a particularly toxic and widespread defamation of gay men: The claim that they are essentially pedophiles who molest children at far higher rates than heterosexuals.
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The reality is that virtually all real researchers in the field have concluded, as did the American Psychological Association in an official statement, that “homosexual men are not more likely to sexually abuse children than heterosexual men are.”
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Despite the claims made in today’s statement, the SPLC’s listings are not in any way intended to suppress these groups’ free speech. We’re not asking that these groups be silenced or punished in any way. What we are doing is calling them out for their lies.
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the SPLC’s listings of these groups is based on their propagation of known falsehoods — claims about LGBT people that have been thoroughly discredited by scientific authorities — and repeated, groundless name-calling.”
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At the end of the day, it’s hard to know if the politicians and other leaders who signed today’s anti-SPLC statement really know some of things the groups they are throwing in with support. What’s a fact is that, despite their claims, the groups have so far, without exception, failed to confront the facts of SPLC’s report.
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Jeremy's as always excellent compilation of the lies of FRC and its kindred hate merchants can be found here.
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