Southern Poverty Law Center Condemns Tony Perkins and FRC

We all should have seen this coming.  Today, FRC president - and white supremacist loving - Tony Perkins tried to blame the Southern Poverty Law Center's ("SPLC") hate group designation of Family Research Council for "giving a license" to the shooter who shot a security guard at FRC's headquarters yesterday.   Thankfully, SPLC isn't standing for Perkins' lies and attempts to shift blame from FRC's own actions and history of hate filled bigotry.   If one looks at the criteria that SPLC uses to determine hate groups status, it takes a real effort on the part of the organization being designated as a hate group to earn the designation.  Among the criteria is the continued deliberate, knowing use of lies and falsehoods with a goal of inspiring hate and animus toward a group based on their innate characteristics.   Merely stating religious beliefs is far short of earning the hate group designation.  Anyone who has followed FRC's website and statements made by its mouth pieces knows that no lie is too extreme for the organization in terms of furthering the goal of denigrating and stigmatizing LGBT Americans.  Here is SPLC's response to Tony Perkins' sleazy self-serving lies:

Yesterday’s attack on the Family Research Council and the shooting of a security guard there was a tragedy. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) deplores all violence, and our thoughts are with the wounded victim, Leo Johnson, his family and others who lived through the attack.

For more than 40 years, the SPLC has battled against political extremism and political violence. We have argued consistently that violence is no answer to problems in a democratic society, and we have strongly criticized all those who endorse such violence, whether on the political left or the political right.

But this afternoon, FRC President Tony Perkins attacked the SPLC, saying it had encouraged and enabled the attack by labeling the FRC a “hate group.” The attacker, Floyd Corkins, “was given a license to shoot an unarmed man by organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center,” Perkins said. “I believe the Southern Poverty Law Center should be held accountable for their reckless use of terminology.”

Perkins’ accusation is outrageous. The SPLC has listed the FRC as a hate group since 2010 because it has knowingly spread false and denigrating propaganda about LGBT people — not, as some claim, because it opposes same-sex marriage. The FRC and its allies on the religious right are saying, in effect, that offering legitimate and fact-based criticism in a democratic society is tantamount to suggesting that the objects of criticism should be the targets of criminal violence.

As the SPLC made clear at the time and in hundreds of subsequent statements and press interviews, we criticize the FRC for claiming, in Perkins’ words, that pedophilia is “a homosexual problem” — an utter falsehood, as every relevant scientific authority has stated. An FRC official has said he wanted to “export homosexuals from the United States.” The same official advocated the criminalizing of homosexuality.

Perkins and his allies, seeing an opportunity to score points, are using the attack on their offices to pose a false equivalency between the SPLC’s criticisms of the FRC and the FRC’s criticisms of LGBT people. The FRC routinely pushes out demonizing claims that gay people are child molesters and worse — claims that are provably false. It should stop the demonization and affirm the dignity of all people.

Frankly, Tony Perkins and Christianists of his ilk - Victoria Cobb at The Family Foundation and Matt Staver at Liberty University are Virginia based equivalents - are the quintessential examples of why when the lips of  "godly Christians" are moving, the best and safest approach is to assume that they are lying.