Help Expose the Southern Poverty Law Center

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has published its annual list of “hate groups” and for the second year in a row, it includes my organization, Abiding Truth Ministries. I know this because I recently received a call from a reporter at The Californian newspaper Riverside County California asking for my comment on this designation. I spent nearly an hour on the phone attempting to defend our reputation as a civilized and reasonable advocate of the pro-family agenda for society, rooted in the Bible. I am not the violent hatemonger they portray me as, which you may confirm for yourself at my website www.defendthefamily.com. Nearly everything I have written in my career as a Christian activist is published there.

I am well used to fending off the accusation of hate, since that tactical rhetorical weapon is leveled by the “gay” movement and its allies against everyone, however mild-mannered or benign, who dares to assert the self-evident truth that homosexuality is wrong and harmful. However, to be labeled as such by the SPLC is a whole different story. This is an organization which purports to be the national authority on hate groups, a claim which carries substantial credibility due to its past high-profile campaigns against racist groups (which I supported). In fact, the SPLC conducts training seminars on hate groups for law enforcement agencies.
After being placed on the hate list the first time, I tried diligently over the course of a year to persuade the SPLC to remove us on the grounds that we really don’t belong there.

My 3 letters to the SPLC are posted on this blog for your review. Finally, I sent a letter to SPLC staffer Mark Potok asking specifically why we had been placed on the list and what we would need to do to be removed. I never received an answer to my letter (nor to my prior phone call), but when the reporter posed that same question to him he replied that we were added because I am the co-author of The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party and I would need to repudiate the claims of the book to be removed from the list.

Obviously, I have no intention of distancing myself from my accurate, factual documentation of the homosexual roots of the Nazi regime. As I stated to the reporter, I stand ready (as I have since the publication of our first edition in 1995) to debate the facts and implications of The Pink Swastika anywhere and with any competent opponent. A portion of The Pink Swastika is published online at http://www.defendthefamily.com/pfrc/showproducts.php and I encourage everyone to read it for themselves.

However, having now exhausted diplomatic options for resolving this problem I am left with the choice of giving up or taking more aggressive measures. Frankly, if the attacks against me were limited to the SPLC’s own website, I would probably just drop the issue, even though one polemic by SPLC writer Casey Sanchez is by far the most vicious piece of libel I have suffered in 20 years of being smeared by “gay“ apologists. I’m not really concerned with the opinions of the loonies at SPLC and their followers, and I am ever mindful of (and grateful for) the Biblical promises related to suffering for being a faithful Christian. But the SPLC’s articles on me and ATM are now being cited as documentation of my bad character all over the web, and growing more and more outrageous in their claims, including the absolutely false and beyond-the-pale accusation that I defend murder of homosexuals.

I have decided that I will not, by my silence, embolden the SPLC to widen its attack on the pro-family movement beyond the several groups already on their “hate” list (most of which as undeserving as ATM of this designation).

How then to respond? One avenue would be litigation, since I am an attorney and I believe some of what they have published on their site is legally actionable. But I believe the more effective response would be to give them a taste of their own medicine and expose the SPLC as the blindly partisan, anti-Christian hate group which it has become. Certainly, SPLC leaders have every right to their bigoted views, but they do not have the right, at the same time, to claim the status of independent, neutral arbiters of the homosexual issue.

The SPLC and its personnel are, in most cases, more deserving of public scrutiny and disapproval than their targets. Their overarching theme seems to be the demonization of the “Christian Right” as a fundraising strategy (see my November 2007 letter to the SPLC below for an analysis of how Christians are treated on their website). It appears to me that the SPLC is, more than anything else, a fundraising machine, and that it has run out of racist threats with which to scare its donor base. Therefore it has turned to the most convenient alternative target, Christians, because the “gays” have already spent years and vast resources publicly painting us as “haters” comparable to racists.

However, the SPLC has not yet learned that Christians are not the easy targets that racists were. No reasonable person endorses racism, and few Americans are willing to defend racists when they are attacked. But Christians are a different story. We’re not racists. We’re not like racists in our actions or beliefs (despite what the “gays“ say). And we have a large, powerful and growing army of social activists at work in the so-called culture war. These Kingdom-minded believers are already angry with the “hate-mongering” smear campaigns that the pro-”gay” media has been waging against us for years, and that the SPLC has only recently begun to mimic.

What’s lacking is someone to turn the attention of the pro-family movement as a whole on the SPLC as a worthy target of its scrutiny and activism. This prior sentence is exactly the sort of statement that the SPLC would like to twist in it’s own fear-mongering fundraising letters, so let me be absolutely clear what I mean about “targeting” the SPLC:

I mean examining every aspect of their organizational life and history -- which we already know is filled with hypocrisy, double-standards, misrepresentations of good people, and other bad stuff -- and exposing the facts to the light of public scrutiny through pro-family and neutral media. No dirty tricks. No violence. No threats. No unethical conduct. Just good old-fashioned truth-telling.
As a victim of the SPLC hate machine I am willing to be that person, but I cannot succeed in this without help. I will need money (one cannot take on a fundraising “Goliath” without at least a few “smooth stones” worth of financial support). Donate at
http://www.defendthefamily.com/help/donate.php

I will also need help gathering information. As of today, consider Hatewatch Watch a repository and clearinghouse for all research and documentation related to the Southern Poverty Law Center. If you are one of those whose skill and interest lean toward the gift of research and investigation consider this a request for legally-obtained data about the SPLC. If you are one of those whose gift is the dissemination of information, whether as a private party or part of a media organization, please introduce yourself to me at sdllaw@gmail.com.

Phase I is about gathering information and processing it into useable forms.

Phase II will involve disseminating the information.


Your Fellow Servant in Christ,

Dr. Scott Lively
President, Abiding Truth Ministries