SPLC Sued By Hate Group Angry Over Exposing of Its Anti-Gay Agenda

Cover page of Coral Ridge Ministries  endorsed anti-gay magazine

The Southern Poverty Law Center ("SPLC") is perhaps the premier U.S. non-profit organization that monitors the activities of domestic hate groups and other extremists – including the Ku Klux Klan, the neo-Nazi movement, neo-Confederates, racist skinheads, black separatists, anti-government militias, Christian Identity adherents, radical Christian extremists and others.  It currently tracks more than 1,600 extremist groups operating across the country. It also publishes investigative reports, works to train law enforcement officers and share key intelligence, and offer expert analysis to the media and public. Each year since 1990, it has released an annual census of U.S. hate groups.  Its founder, Morris Deas, who I met years ago, helped push for the prosecution of the KKK members who lynched Michael Donald when I lived in Mobile, Alabama.  Among the groups SPLC has certified as hate groups are a number of organizations that parade around as "Christian family values" organizations which disseminate deliberate and often grotesques lies and untruths about the LGBT community (they often also have white supremacist and/or white nationalist tendencies).  Much of their anti-LGBT propaganda is modeled on the Nazi propaganda against the Jews and does little more that change the word "Jew" to "gay."

The positive results of SPLC's work is that increasingly the mainstream news media has stopped giving platforms to leaders of these organizations.  A prime example if Tony Perkins, president of Family Research Council who has documented ties to several white supremacy groups and who has pushed vicious lies about LGBT people.  Now, some of these groups are suing SPLC because it has rightly exposed them for what they are.  While they whine that they are being "persecuted for their religious faith" their real complaint is that they have lost influence and even more importantly, they have lost income as donors have come to recognize their deceitful lies.  A piece in Huffington Post by a blogger friend helps to underscore the true viciousness and dishonesty of these organizations and they fact that hate is their main stock in trade.  Here are excerpts:

A ministry currently suing the Southern Poverty Law Center for being designated as an anti-LGBTQ hate group may soon learn the lesson about past actions coming back to bite.

First, a little background:

D. James Kennedy Ministries, based at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, has filed a federal lawsuit in Alabama against the Montgomery-based Southern Poverty Law Center for calling the ministry a hate group. The lawsuit was filed Aug. 22 in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama in Montgomery. The lawsuit alleges that the SPLC ‘illegally trafficked in false and misleading descriptions of the services offered by DJKM and committed defamation against DJKM arising from the publication and distribution of false information that libels the ministry’s reputation and subjects the ministry to disgrace, ridicule, odium, and contempt in the estimation of the public,’ according to a statement by the ministry. 

The Southern Poverty Law Center has made it clear that anti-LGBTQ hate groups are designated so because they demonize the LGBTQ community in the most lurid, inaccurate terms:

The religious right in America has employed a variety of strategies in its efforts to beat back the increasingly confident LGBT rights movement. One of those has been defamation. Many of its leaders have engaged in the crudest type of name-calling, describing LGBT people as ‘perverts’ with ‘filthy habits’ who seek to snatch the children of straight parents and ‘convert’ them to gay sex. They have disseminated disparaging ‘facts’ about gays that are simply untrue — assertions that are remarkably reminiscent of the way white intellectuals and scientists once wrote about the ‘bestial’ black man and his supposedly threatening sexuality. And that brings up to the late James Kennedy. The D. James Kennedy Ministries has a huge section dedicated to his life and his work.  One thing it doesn’t have is when Kennedy endorsed . . . . [a] 1986 comic book [the cover is at the top of this post] . . . . his endorsement is the first one on the back cover, with his official title as “Senior Minister, Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church.”

Kennedy said the following in his endorsement:

Dick Hafer [the comic book’s author] has produced a very accurate portrayal of homosexuality and the problem it poses to our nation and civilization. This unique book deserves an open-minded reading by all Americans, and especially by those who serve in leadership capacities. Kennedy calling this book “unique” is a rather interesting description. If you want, you can go to this link  and this one to see the book in its entirety. But I’m warning you now. It’s not pretty. . . . read the list of endorsers again [see image below]. They include a former Congressional leader and another right-wing organization still present in D.C.

[T]he “research” from this book comes from the discredited researcher whom I have mentioned on so many occasions: Paul Cameron.  SPLC has an extensive file on him and the anti-LGBTQ hate groups who still cite his junk science.

So, basically breaking this down, there are questions which need to be answered by the D. James Kennedy Ministries before it goes about declaring that it is being “persecuted for its religious beliefs” by SPLC. Most specifically, I’m curious to know if the ministry shares the opinion “expressed” by its namesake when he endorsed that awful booklet.  If the ministry doesn’t, then I would recommend that it publicly denounces Kennedy’s past actions. If the ministry doesn’t want to do that, then I guess that answers a lot of questions as to its “hate group” status.

Paul Cameron deliberately falsified his "research" and was thrown out of every professional association to which he had belonged because of his fraudulent studies and utterly false publications.  The organizations that routinely cite his work, many of which have earned their own hate group designations, include Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, American Family Association, Traditional Values Coalition, here in Virginia, The Family Foundation, and, of course, Coral Ridge Ministries.  Perhaps most disturbing is the fact that many of these organizations have tax exempt status since they pretend to be "educational organizations."  In short, every U.S. taxpayer is indirectly subsidizing them. This needs to end.