CV NEWS FEED // The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a deeply controversial far-left activist group well known for baselessly accusing its political opponents of “hate,” recently branded an effort to foster free speech and religious freedom as “white supremacist.”
The SPLC last week released a report titled “‘Viewpoint diversity’ advocacy promotes white nationalist talking points.”
The report attacks the Viewpoint Diversity Score – an effort launched by the pro-religious freedom legal group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) to rank large corporations on “their level of respect for free speech and religious freedom.”
The Score’s official website states that its rankings are “based on policies, practices, and other relevant criteria” within each examined corporation. The vast majority of companies ranked have scores lower than 20%. Many have scores in the single digits, including Apple (5%), Airbnb (4%), and X, formerly Twitter (2%).
SPLC’s report alleged that such rankings are an attempt “to entrench racist and exclusionary corporate policies under the guise of a socially conscious-sounding phrase: ‘viewpoint diversity.’”
>> SPLC ‘HATE’ REPORT DEMONIZES RELIGIOUS FREEDOM <<
SPLC claimed that ADF is trying to get companies to implement “anti-pluralist policies.” The report continued:
Like most efforts from the anti-LGBTQ+ legal group, its public messaging and legal strategy links Christianity with opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts and LGBTQ+ rights.
Rather than promoting religious pluralism, ADF’s public relations and legal crusades are intertwined with Christian supremacist and white supremacist ideologies. Characterizing diversity as a threat to white Christian men, ADF is working to dismantle DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] protections and weaponizing government regulations to enforce sectarian Christian doctrines in publicly traded companies.
The Daily Signal Managing Editor Tyler O’Neil wrote on Monday that the SPLC’s claim that Viewpoint Diversity upholds “white supremacy” is “absurd on its face.”
“The ADF index isn’t trying to bully corporations to adopt its positions on political issues,” O’Neil wrote:
Instead, it’s urging them to return to neutral, to recognize that not all Americans want to wear rainbow-flag pins and shout their abortions. Business should be about treating customers, employees, and shareholders well, regardless of what they believe.
Also on Monday, O’Neil wrote on X that ADF launched the Score in response to “companies embracing radical gender ideology, critical race theory, and climate policies in the ESG [environmental, social, and governance] movement.” ADF’s effort is meant to “even the playing field,” O’Neil explained.
O’Neil added that encouraging corporations to be politically neutral is “too much for the SPLC.”
“Apparently, this vaunted ‘civil rights’ nonprofit can’t stomach the idea of companies allowing their employees to dissent, or of businesses being urged not to shove woke priorities down customers’ throats,” he wrote:
You may not agree with ADF’s diversity score, but claiming that it is rooted in “white supremacy” is absurd. The score is an engine to promote open dialogue and debate in an increasingly stifling climate. SPLC is trying to shame this effort into silence.
O’Neil is a longtime critic of the SPLC. His 2020 book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center” details some of the heavily scrutinized far-left group’s many past controversies.
The SPLC has been widely criticized and discredited by critics across the political spectrum, including many on the left.
CatholicVote reported last year that the SPLC has been
panned for its addition of so-called “radical traditionalist Catholicism” as a category of alleged “extremism.”
The infamous leaked Richmond memo from earlier this year was directly attributed to this categorization by the SPLC. The memo, which was later revealed to have originated from at least three Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) field offices, exposed the Bureau for targeting American Mass-going Catholics.
>> REPORT CLAIMS SPLC MET WITH BIDEN-HARRIS WHITE HOUSE 11 TIMES <<
A September 2023 CatholicVote report detailed several more instances when the self-professed civil rights group was scrutinized.
Both of these cases were also covered by mainstream media outlets.
CatholicVote reported:
In a 2019 tell-all piece published by The New Yorker, former SPLC employee Bob Moser said he and his coworkers often felt like they were “pawns in what was, in many respects, a highly profitable scam.”
In a USA Today op-ed published later that year, Jessica Prol Smith called the group “a hate-based scam that nearly caused me to be murdered.” Smith, a longtime pro-life activist, explained that at the time when she was working for the Family Research Council (FRC), her office was attacked by a far-left domestic terrorist.
