Saturday, March 01, 2014

SPLC Adds Liberty Counsel and Other Groups To Anti-Gay Hate Group List

As noted before on this blog, the Southern Poverty Law Center ("SPLC") tracks hate groups that range from supremacist groups to Neo-Nazi organizations to anti-gay hate groups.  In order to win a "hate group" designation an organization must have a demonstrated track record of disseminating deliberate lies with a goal of demonizing targeted groups and engendering hatred.  In short, merely reciting religious beliefs without more doesn't earn one a hate group designation.  Now, SPLC has added seven anti-gay organizations to its hate group list.  Domestically, the most well known is Liberty Counsel which is affiliated with Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, and headed up by Liberty University law school deans Mat Staver (pictured at right) and Matt Barber, two virulent homophobes and hate merchants of the highest order.  Also making the hate group list are The World Congress of Families/Howard Center For Family, Religion and Society, based in Rockford, Illinois, and the Catholic Family and Human Rights institute (C-FAM), which have actively supported Vladimir Putin's Russian war against LGBT individuals.  Here are highlights from Truth Wins Out on these new designations:
Two of the new groups on the list have grabbed the spotlight much more in the past year than in the decade before. Indeed, they’re often mentioned in the same breath. The World Congress of Families/Howard Center For Family, Religion and Society, based in Rockford, Illinois, and the Catholic Family and Human Rights institute (C-FAM), have actively supported Russia in the pogrom it’s waging against its LGBT citizens. The World Congress convenes international events which bring anti-gay and other hate groups from around the world together under the guise of “protecting the family,” and this year, their conference will be held inside the Kremlin. In fact, the two organizations were formed around the same time, with many of the same people involved, with a direct intention to spread far-right Christian thinking around the globe.

The World Congress of Families serves as a vessel to bring worldwide hate groups together, as one can see from perusing the sponsors for their international events. The Religious Right has lost the culture war in the United States, and they realized over the past decade that they would have to expand internationally in order to keep their pocketbooks solvent and their ideology relevant.

Both the World Congress of Families and C-Fam have been vocally supportive of Russia’s anti-gay laws, with the WCF expressing support in a press release not long after the Duma’s final vote on the “propaganda” law. The World Congress also held a roundtable in US House of Representatives office space recently in order to teach American “pro-family” activists how to export their hate around the world. Austin Ruse, president of C-Fam, expressed regret that the United States wouldn’t be able to start the sort of pogrom against LGBT people that Russia has, as he praised Russia in their efforts. It’s likely that the international activities of these groups contributed heavily to the SPLC’s decision to label them hate groups.

The Liberty Counsel‘s inclusion on the list has been a very long time coming. . . .  Liberty Counsel, in its legal capacity, is a go-to outfit for conservative Christians claiming persecution (AKA having to play by the same rules as everyone else), most notably in the past several years in their defense of kidnapper Lisa Miller, who left the country with her daughter, rather than having to share custody with her former partner, Janet Jenkins. Liberty Counsel has also been very active in fighting to preserve anti-gay parents’ rights to torture their kids with harmful, discredited “ex-gay” therapy, which creates the very real possibility that those kids will be scarred for life.

These two men [Mat Staver and Matt Barber] are champions of asserting that any advance made by LGBT people is an assault on Christians, despite the fact that millions of Christians disagree with their beliefs. Just in recent months, Barber has suggested that anti-gay bigots are just like Jesus; claimed that Christians who support LGBT people are apostates; suggested that gay people are essentially  monsters; claimed that President Obama is trying to purge Christians from the military; and put forth the strange theory that gay marriage caused the Biblical flood. In the same time frame, Staver has come up with doozies of his own, such as his belief that, once marriage equality is nationwide, everyone will go gay, and his worry that, once “ex-gay” therapy is banned for minors nationwide, wingnut parents will have to resort to taking their kids to “back-alley” ex-gay parlors for the therapy they so desperately want to inflict on their children. 

Other new groups added include the Ruth Institute (formerly affiliated with NOM), the Pacific Justice Institute, Generations With Vision and Christ The King Church.

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