The Number of Hate Groups Rose By 14% in 2015

For many years the Southern Poverty Law Center ("SPLC")  has tracked hate groups that operate in America.  Many are white supremacists groups and chapters of the KKK, a few are black separatist groups, a growing number of groups are anti-Muslim, and some are radical Catholic traditionalists who have virulent anti-Semitic views and propaganda.  Frighteningly, most other that black separatist groups tend to align politically with the Republican Party that has increasingly shown its willingness to embrace hate merchants.   In its 2016 Intelligence Report, SPLC looks at the rise in hate groups in every state across America.  The report also looks at the vitriol and hate being broadcast by Republicans like Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio among others.  Here are highlights:

The SPLC found that the number of hate groups operating in 2015 was 14 percent higher than in 2014. Anti-government “Patriot” groups – armed militias and others animated by conspiracy theories – also grew 14 percent during the same period.

Hate groups increased from 784 groups in 2014 to 892 last year. Antigovernment “Patriot” groups grew from 874 in 2014 to 998.

This growth came amid a series of lethal terrorist attacks by extremists. In June, a white supremacist murdered nine black parishioners at a church in Charleston, South Carolina. In December, Islamist radicals killed 14 people at a work party in San Bernardino, California – just days after an anti-abortion extremist killed three people at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado. These were just the worst of numerous other attacks and foiled extremist plots reviewed in this issue.

The demonization of Muslims, Latinos, immigrants and others became commonplace in 2015. Presidential candidate Donald Trump made headlines with a call for a temporary ban on Muslim immigration and his description of Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug dealers. He even cited a bogus “poll” by the Center for Security Policy that falsely claimed that a quarter of American Muslims support violent jihadists such as the members of the Islamic State.

The Center for Security Policy is one of two anti-Muslim groups listed as hate groups for the first time in this year’s report. The other is ACT! for America.

Other political figures launched their own verbal attacks against a host of targets to exploit the anger and fear of some Americans over the country’s changing demographics, immigration, the legalization of same-sex marriage, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and atrocities committed by Islamist terrorists. Economic pressure on white, working-class Americans has also contributed to the anger.

The hate groups listed in this report include neo-Nazis, white nationalists, neo-Confederates, racist skinheads, Klansmen and black separatists. Other hate groups on the list target LGBT people, Muslims or immigrants, and some specialize in producing racist music or propaganda denying the Holocaust. 

White Supremacist Cults Are all the Rage in Parts of Southern Virginia.

Robert Doyle and Ronald Chaney

The Hampton Roads area of Southeast Virginia has its problems but compared to areas of the southern tier of the state to the west make Hampton Roads look like a center of the enlightened, rational, liberal universe.  White supremacy is alive and well in many of these areas and homophobia and anti-gay bigotry is likewise off the charts.   The Daily Beast looks at  recent arrests that ought to send shivers down one's back.   Not surprisingly, one of the white supremacy groups hails from near Lynchburg, Virginia, home of the always toxic and extreme Liberty University.   While the group mentioned purports to subscribe to Nordic pagan traditions, its views on blacks and gays (and Jews) differ little from those held by the Liberty University crowd.  Oh, and did I mention that these areas vote Republican?  Here are article excerpts:

Viking-inspired white supremacists trying to terrorize black Christians in the South: not as rare as you think.

News broke yesterday that the FBI arrested two young men under the suspicion that they were planning to start a race war by bombing black churches in their home state of Virginia. The men, Robert Doyle and Ronald Chaney, allegedly ascribe to an Icelandic pagan faith called Asatru that has a disturbingly large following among white supremacists.

Its defenders say the religion itself isn’t inherently bigoted. But many white supremacists find it appealing because, unlike Christianity, it isn’t influenced by Judaism. If you think the KKK is soft on the Jews because it’s Christian-friendly, Asatru might be for you.

The SPLC [Southern Poverty Law Center] notes that Odinism, which has ties to Asatru, played an important role in some corners of Nazism. 

“Its Nordic/Teutonic mythology was a bedrock belief for key Third Reich leaders,” the group noted in a 1998 write-up, “and it was an integral part of the initiation rites and cosmology of the elite Schutzstaffel, which supervised Adolf Hitler’s network of death camps.”
And they aren’t the only young white men to target black churches in Virginia.

In 2012, Maurice Thompson Michaely pleaded guilty to arson—specifically, to charges of Unlawfully Entering Property of Another with the Intent to Damage and Maliciously Destroying or Defacing Church Property, according to the Bristow Beat. Michaely tried to burn down a historic black church, the 135-year-old Mount Pleasant Baptist Church. The fire didn’t injure anyone since the building wasn’t occupied when he attempted to burn it down. However, the fire caused about $1 million of damage, according to ABC affiliate WJLA and he was sentenced to two and a half years in prison.

According to social media screenshots on the Fools of Vinland blog, Michaely goes by the name Hjalti and is part of a group based outside Lynchburg, Virginia., called Wolves of Vinland. . . . . Matthias Waggener, one prominent member of the group, described it as an “Odinic Wolfcult.”  He also said the group practices animal sacrifice.

And at least one prominent white supremacist, Jack Donovan, is affiliated with their group. Donovan, who recently spoke at the white supremacist National Policy Institute’s event in Washington, D.C., instagrammed a picture of a dead sheep, tagged #wolvesofvinland.  “Wolves and prospects preparing to butcher the sheep we sacrificed this afternoon at moot,” he wrote.

Animal sacrifice, Norse mythology, wolf-themed weekends—it all sounds like something out of a heavy metal music video or a Live Action Role Play convention. But as yesterday’s arrests evince, viking-inspired white supremacy is alive and well and weird in Southern Virginia.

For more on this frightening rising form of white supremacy, read the SPLC report here.

Jury Finds "Ex-Gay" Ministry Guilty of Consumer Fraud

Just recently Christopher Doyle, an "ex-gay" who has makes a living peddling the "ex-gay" myth authored an article that appeared in the Christian Post that would have readers to have believed that the lawsuit against Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing (JONAH) was going down in flames.  Like everything else that comes out of Doyle, the picture he depicted was utterly false and deliberately so.  To the contrary, JONAH lost the case and the jury found that it was guilty of fraud.  The same charge, of course, in reality equally applies to every other "ex-gay" ministry in America.  A piece in NJ.com details the historic win by the plaintiffs and counsel from the Southern Poverty Law Center.   Here are highlights:

A New Jersey jury on Thursday found a non-profit group that provides gay-to-straight conversion therapy guilty of consumer fraud for promising clients they could overcome their sexual urges by undressing in front of other men, pummeling an effigy of their mothers, and re-enacting traumatic childhood experiences.

In the first case in the nation to put the controversial practice on trial, the jury concluded that Arthur Goldberg and Elaine Berk, the founders of Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing in Jersey City and life coach Alan Downing to whom JONAH referred patients, "engaged in unconscionable commercial practices" and misrepresented their services.

The verdict requires JONAH and Downing to refund thousands of dollars paid by former clients Michael Ferguson, Benjamin Unger, Sheldon Bruck, Chaim Levin, and parents Jo Bruck and Bella Levin for the individual and group counseling sessions and the "journey into manhood" weekends in the woods. Downing charged $60 to $100 for group and individual sessions but shared 20 percent with JONAH to help defray its administrative costs.

After three hours of deliberations, the jury found Unger was entitled to $17,950; Chaim Levin was entitled to $650; his mother, Bella, $4,000; and Bruck's mother, Jo, $500.

But the victory has broader implications. The national civil rights legal advocacy group Southern Poverty Law Center filed the case to take a stand against conversion therapy — a frequent target of public criticism since the passage of same-sex marriage laws and other LGBT legal protections.
"This is a momentous event in the history of the LGBT rights movement," said David Dinielli, deputy director for the law center and lead attorney for the plaintiffs. "The jury agreed not only is this based on lies, but it is an unconscionable business practice."

The legal battle is not over, Dinielli said they would be asking the court for an injunction to stop JONAH from operating. They will also seek the payment of their attorneys fees, which is permitted under the consumer fraud act.

"This is something brutal based on lies, and it needs to stop," he said.

James Bromley, one of the plaintiff's attorneys, accused Goldberg of lying to his clients - three orthodox Jews and a Mormon- who were desperate to conform to the expectations of their religious communities to marry and have children. They were lured by Goldberg's false promise of the program's two-thirds success rate, but Bromley reminded jurors Goldberg testified that estimate was based on counselors' opinions. 

He [Bromley] asked the jury to recall the testimony of Carol Bernstein, former president of the American Psychiatric Association, who compared conversion therapy counselors "to amateur surgeons operating on the minds of young gay men."  "You never want to go under the knife with an amateur surgeon," he said.

These "ministries" need to be shut down nationwide  and therapists who engage in the voodoo like practices need to lose their licenses.  Let's hope that this is the first of many such lawsuits.

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.

Complaint Filed to Challenge Illinois ‘Ex-Gay’ Therapist’s Professional License

In a move that needs to be undertaken around the country, several organizations have filed a complaint in Illinois seeking revocation of the professional license of clinical social worker (pictured at left) who practices scientifically-discredited “reparative therapy.”  Given that every legitimate mental health and medical association in the nation condemns so-called "reparative therapy" - a/k/a "pray away the gay therapy" - the thrust of the complaint is that the clinical social worker is acting unethically and endangering his clients.  Reparative therapy has recently been banned in California for those under 18 years of age and a similar ban effort may be launched in New Jersey.  Until such bans spread nationwide, complaints such as this one in Illinois may be the way to shut down the lies and snake oil peddled by the "ex-gay" ministry crowd and Christianist therapists who put their extremist personal beliefs (and money) ahead of the well being of their clients.  A copy of the complaint can be found here.  Here are highlights from Truth Wins Out:

The Southern Poverty Law Center, the Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health, and the American Psychoanalytic Association filed a complaint today against Paul McNulty, a state-licensed clinical social worker who practices scientifically-discredited “reparative therapy” in Bloomington, Illinois. The groups lodged their complaint with the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation, the agency that oversees professional licensing in that state.

In the complaint, SPLC Deputy Legal Director Christine Sun notes that the department “has the authority ‘to suspend or revoke a license, refuse to issue or renew a license or take other disciplinary action, based upon its finding of unethical, unauthorized, or unprofessional conduct.’” She also points out that bringing bias into the patient-counselor relationship is is prohibited, concluding:

“By offering and embracing scientifically unsound and potentially harmful services that reflect prejudice, Mr. McNulty appears to be in violation of the State’s licensing standards.”

McNulty’s profile boasts of his memberships in Exodus International and NARTH and says that he is “passionate” about his therapy with males “ in the areas of relationships, sexuality, same-sex attraction, and various addictions.”

I applaud this set in shutting down these therapists and bogus "clinics" like that of Michele Bachmann and her husband "Marcia" Bachmann.  A voodoo practitioner or witch doctor has just as much likelihood of "changing" someone's sexual orientation as this therapists who in my view are nothing more than unethical, parasitic quacks who prey on gays or more frequently the parents of gays.   Not by coincidence, frequently these merchants of the ex-gay myth receive financing from virulent anti-gay organizations and SPLC registered hate groups.