CV NEWS FEED // The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) on Tuesday released its “The Year in Hate & Extremism 2023 Report,” in which the controversial far-left activist group included a section vilifying the notion of religious freedom.
The section of the report, titled “A Year of Preparation Under the Specter of Conspiracy,” claimed that the SPLC “documented the highest number of active anti-LGBTQ+ and white nationalist groups we have ever recorded” in the last year:
[T]he activities of hate and antigovernment groups, the “holy war” and “race war” rhetoric they employ … foreshadow an attempt to exploit American democratic and electoral processes in 2024 to finally accomplish the goals of the insurrection.
The SPLC charged that its political opponents seek “the suppression of multiracial, pluralistic democracy.”
“Increasing numbers of elected officials and influencers on the far right are turning to conspiracy and theocracy in their politics, finding particular support for these ideas in the Republican Party,” the group claimed.
The SPLC called House Speaker Mike Johnson’s, R-LA, legal work on behalf of religious freedom a “testament to the level of influence these theocratic ideologies wield within the Republican Party.”
Specifically, the leftist group pointed to Johnson’s past role as a litigator for the pro-religious freedom legal organization Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which they branded as an “anti-LGBTQ hate group.”
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Furthermore, the SPLC accused the ADF of employing a “legal strategy” that “often pits Christians unfairly against LGBTQ+ people in a legal gambit to undermine nondiscrimination laws through claims of ‘religious freedom.’”
“The strategy implies and asserts that Christianity and LGBTQ+ identity are inherently mutually exclusive,” the SPLC purported:
The [ADF] also claims credit for helping overturn constitutional protections for abortion and, in 2023, led the legal push to eliminate access to reproductive and LGBTQ+ health care primarily by amplifying pseudoscientific claims about abortion and LGBTQ+ identity.
Critics panned the SPLC’s report as an example of overt politically-charged bias.
The Daily Signal Managing Editor Tyler O’Neil wrote in a Tuesday commentary piece that the so-called “Year in Hate” report goes “out of its way to attack” Johnson and the ADF while “demoniz[ing] efforts to defend religious freedom.”
“In reality, ADF’s most famous client, Christian baker Jack Phillips, will gladly sell cakes to anyone, but he refuses to craft custom cakes to celebrate same-sex weddings because he believes marriage is between one man and one woman,” O’Neil noted.
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“Colorado’s government used a ‘nondiscrimination’ law to punish him for this, and ADF sued on his behalf,” he explained. “ADF did not ‘unfairly’ pit anyone against anyone.”
“LGBTQ activists are constantly demonizing conservative Christians and attempting to silence them,” O’Neil wrote. “The SPLC demonizes ADF for pushing back.”
O’Neil summarized the SPLC’s reasoning: “If you don’t get on board with woke, you oppose ‘democracy.’ You’re a bigot, a racist, or a Christian nationalist.”
He went on to call the activist group “spin masters”:
The SPLC has long demonized mainstream conservative and Christian nonprofits by putting them on a map with Ku Klux Klan chapters. It updates this “hate map” annually with a “Year in Hate and Extremism” report for the previous year.
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That report reads like a dispatch from a “Handmaid’s Tale” dystopia, where evil white Christian jackbooted thugs have seized control of the government and are forcing everyone to adopt their propaganda. The report is so divorced from reality, it would be downright hilarious if so much of the legacy media, corporate America, the Democrats, and the Department of Justice didn’t take it deadly seriously.
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As CatholicVote reported last October, the SPLC “has also been widely panned for its addition of so-called ‘radical traditionalist Catholicism’ as a category of alleged ‘extremism.’”
“[The SPLC] claims that the loosely defined group of Catholics ‘may make up the largest single group of serious antisemites in America,’” CatholicVote noted:
The infamous leaked Richmond memo from [last] 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.
As of Tuesday, June 11, the SPLC still has a category devoted to “radical traditionalist Catholics” in the “Extremist Files” section of its website.
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In a September 2023 report, CatholicVote outlined several controversies that have dogged the SPLC in recent years:
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.
