A True Story About the Southern Poverty Law Center
A refreshing and much-needed take-down of the ethically impoverished Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and its avaricious founder Morris Dees inspired me to recount IFI’s true story about our interaction with the blackguards who maintain the SPLC’s “hate groups” list.
The impetus for Carl Cannon’s critique of the SPLC on Real Clear Politics was the recent assault on esteemed scholar Charles Murray at Middlebury College in Vermont, an assault that was inspired by the pernicious SPLC, the same organization that inspired the shooting at the Family Research Council’s headquarters in 2012.
While ignorant school board members in Illinois School District U-46 cite the SPLC to discredit the Illinois Family Institute (IFI), the FBI has stopped using the SPLC as a resource, and Cannon reports that the “most scathing assessments of Dees and his group have always come from the left. Stephen B. Bright, a Yale law professor and president of the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights, calls Dees a ‘shyster’ and a ‘con man.’”
In early March, 2009, which was about six months after I started working for IFI, we learned that IFI had been put on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) hate groups list.
Since IFI stands unequivocally opposed to both violence and hatred, we wondered why we were listed as an “anti-gay” hate group when other institutions like the Roman Catholic Church and many Protestant denominations that share our same views on matters related to homosexuality were not.
Why the SPLC first claimed IFI was put on its hate groups list
For clarification I called the SPLC and spoke with Heidi Beirich. Our conversation was troubling in that Ms. Beirich revealed that even a tenuous, distant connection to statements the SPLC doesn’t like will land an organization on their hate groups list.
She told me that the only reason IFI had been included on the hate groups list was that in 2005, IFI’s former executive director Peter LaBarbera had posted a very short article by someone not affiliated with IFI (i.e., Paul Cameron) for which LaBarbera had written an even shorter introduction.
Although there were no defamatory comments made in this piece or LaBarbera’s introduction, Beirich claimed that in other articles by Cameron (articles that never appeared on IFI), he had suggested that (in Beirich’s words) “Gays are sickly, and people should stay away from them.” IFI had no idea if that claim were true, but if it were, IFI would reject it, find it inconsistent with Scripture, and find it repellent. The problem was IFI had never cited or endorsed such rhetoric, and yet the SPLC had labeled IFI as an active hate group based on it.
Beirich also claimed that in the short article IFI had posted, Cameron had cited a purportedly erroneous statistic regarding shortened lifespans of homosexual men. I responded that I could see how a statistic could be erroneous and derived from flawed methodology, but I couldn’t see erroneous statistics as defamatory or hateful. I don’t think health statistics alone, even statistics that emerge from flawed methodologies, can be construed as hatred. In fact, if there are particular health risks associated with particular sexual practices, it would be callous and irresponsible not to share that information publicly.
But, more important, the same finding regarding reduced life expectancy for homosexual men has been reported by a world-renowned medical journal, and has been cited as true by homosexual activists when it serves their purposes.
That study, which appeared in Oxford University’s International Journal of Epidemiology, concluded that “In a major Canadian centre, life expectancy at age 20 years for gay and bisexual men is 8 to 20 years less than for all men. If the same pattern of mortality were to continue, we estimate that nearly half of gay and bisexual men currently aged 20 years will not reach their 65th birthday.”
Also, in their book Caring For Lesbian and Gay People-A Clinical Guide, authors Dr. Allan Peterkin and Dr. Cathy Risdon suggest that the life expectancy of gay/bisexual men in Canada is 55 years.
Whatever problems with methodology the study Cameron cited may have had, the specific nature of the author’s conclusions that bothered Beirich seems to be consistent with that of others. In addition, merely pointing to health statistics cannot reasonably be construed as defamatory.
What the SPLC’s Mark Potok did next
Following our exposé of the reason for the SPLC’s inclusion of IFI on their “anti-gay” hate groups list, the SPLC started receiving complaints, which evidently didn’t sit too well with them. As a result of those complaints, the editor of their ironically named “Intelligence Report,” which includes the hate groups list, Mark Potok, started leaving troubling voice messages around the country for those who called to complain.
Here’s a transcription of one of those messages:
Yes, Hi, this is a message for . . . from Mark Potok, Southern Poverty Law Center. Very briefly, I just wanna say very briefly – we do list them (Illinois Family Institute) for a reason, which we’ve stated publicly. They (IFI) have been less, in my opinion, than honest about what we really said. They publish and promote the work of a man named Paul Cameron. Paul Cameron is a guy who is infamous for over the last 20 years for producing, for publishing fake studies that allege all kinds of terrible things about homosexuals. For instance, that gay men are, something like, 20 times more likely to molest children; that gay men have an average death age of something like 43 because they’re so sickly and, ya know, sorta do such terrible things. These things are completely false and have been proven false long ago. Our view is that the Illinois Family Institute promotes these complete falsehoods. Then that is hateful activity. We never list any group on the basis of simply disagreeing morally or otherwise with homosexuality. We told the Illinois Family Institute directly that if they remove this material from their website, in fact, that we would take them off the list. Instead, what they’ve done is essentially launched an attack on us to try to get people to call us as you did. Anyway, that’s all. I just wanted to at least briefly explain that it was not quite the way it was being portrayed.
Contrary to Potok’s claim that the SPLC had publicly stated their reason for including IFI on their “anti-gay” hate groups list, to my knowledge, prior to my phone call to them, they had never publicly stated their reason. And stating their reason in a private phone conversation with me doesn’t constitute a public statement.
Was IFI dishonest?
After I heard his voice message in which Potok stated that IFI had “been less than honest,” I called and spoke to him, informing him that in my article, I was scrupulously honest about what Heidi Beirich had said to me. In fact, I even included a link to this follow-up email from Beirich in which she restated the reason for the SPLC’s inclusion of IFI on their hate groups list:
You are correct that LaBarbera’s endorsement of Cameron’s work (which is on IFI’s website) is the reason for our listing your group.
I told Potok that in my phone conversation with her, I even stopped her so that I could write down exact quotes, and I told her I was doing so. In my article that Potok found objectionable, I informed IFI readers that Ms. Beirich had stated the only reason we were on the “anti-gay” hate groups list was that we had posted one article four years prior by a writer not affiliated with IFI, and that if we took that one article down, the SPLC would remove us from the hate groups list. In my article, I also explained that some of the claims that SPLC was making about Cameron’s statements–if true–would be repellent to IFI, and that we were in the process of verifying the accuracy of the SPLC’s claims.
Frankly, I don’t know how I could have been more honest.
Was the SPLC accurate in their description of what IFI had done?
Mr. Potok stated in his voice message that we, IFI, “publish and promote the work of a man named Paul Cameron.” This grossly misrepresented the nature of our involvement with Cameron’s work. It suggests that we regularly or continually published and promoted his work, when, by Potok’s and Beirich’s own admission, we published only one brief article.
More troubling yet, this one article contained no statements remotely like those that Mr. Potok articulated in his voice message: “gay men are, something like, 20 times more likely to molest children” or that “they’re so sickly and, ya know, sorta do such terrible things.”
Potok dug himself in even deeper when he said in his voice message that it is the SPLC’s view that “the Illinois Family Institute promotes these [emphasis mine] complete falsehoods.” “These” is a demonstrative pronoun referring back to the statements he just made. The problem is that he suggested that IFI promotes falsehoods that the SPLC’s own evidence proves we did not promote. The SPLC’s own evidence was the one four-year-old article that did not include any references to “child molestation,” or “sickly homosexuals sorta doing terrible things.” Potok was either stunningly careless with his rhetoric or deliberately manipulative.
I explained to Potok that the one article from four years ago contained no hate rhetoric, and that it alone cannot possibly justify labeling IFI a hate group. I told him that simply quoting a source once does not mean that an organization supports or endorses everything that a source says or does.
I also explained that I would have no problem removing the article except that I wanted to provide evidence for our claim that the SPLC’s reason for including IFI on a hate groups list is flimsy, unethical, irresponsible, and unsavory.
In his voice mail message, Potok continued his turbo-charged rhetoric claiming that IFI “launched an attack” on the SPLC. Once again, his facts are slightly askew. IFI did not call for people to voice their opposition to the SPLC. But more important, phone calls of opposition hardly constitute an “attack.”
Suspicious timing of the SPLC’s addition of IFI to their hate groups list
I asked Mr. Potok if IFI had been on the SPLC’s hate groups list since 2005 when the challenged article was posted. He replied “No.” I then asked when we were first listed, and he said 2008. So, they added us to their list in 2008 based on one brief article posted in 2005. Coincidentally, I started writing for IFI in 2008.
Exposing the SPLC’s deceit
In order to expose the deceit of the SPLC, IFI took the offending article down in 2009, and the SPLC took us off the hate groups list. Then in 2010, we were back on. What happened in 2010?
Well, in 2010, Potok and his accomplices Heidi Beirich, Evelyn Schlatter, and Robert Steinback finally got around to manufacturing criteria for determining what constitutes a “hate group.”
To be clear, in 2008, the SPLC had put IFI on its hate groups list for one short article posted in 2005 that included no hateful rhetoric and two years before they had established criteria for determining what constitutes a hate group.
What the SPLC did in 2010 was create a definition of “hatred” that is elastic enough to allow the inclusion of organizations the SPLC doesn’t like. The dubious criteria dubiously applied focus on social science research or propositions that the SPLC doesn’t like.
Schlatter explains that the “propagation” of “known falsehoods” about homosexuality will result in organizations being included on the SPLC’s “anti-gay” list and perhaps also on their hate groups list. The SPLC claims that groups warrant inclusion on its hate groups list if they propagate “known falsehoods” about homosexuality.
I’m not sure if Beirich and her compeers actually understand what a “known falsehood” (also called a lie) is. A known falsehood is a statement that is objectively, provably false and is known to be false when made. So, let’s take a closer look at just four of the ten “known falsehoods” that she and co-author Robert Steinback cite in their companion article “10 Anti-Gay Myths Debunked”.
Alleged falsehood about hate crimes legislation and the repeal of DADT
The SPLC has said that if an organization argues that hate crime legislation may result in the jailing of pastors who condemn volitional homosexual acts as sinful, the organization is guilty of “anti-gay” hatred and will be included on the SPLC’s hate groups list. And any organization that argues that allowing homosexuals to serve openly in the military will damage the military merits inclusion on its “anti-gay” hate groups list.
How can the SPLC sensibly claim that speculating that hate crimes legislation may lead to the jailing of pastors who condemn homosexuality is a known falsehood? It is a prediction of possible future events that may result from the logical working out of a law. This prediction may not come to fruition, but at this point it cannot reasonably be deemed a “known falsehood.”
And how can a prediction about the effects of allowing homosexuals to serve openly in the military be a known falsehood? Certainly, there are differences of opinion on the effects of the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, but liberal speculation that such a change will not damage the military is not a known truth.
Alleged falsehood concerning mental illness and drug use among homosexuals
If any organization states that homosexuals experience higher rates of depression or drug use might land on the hate groups list. The SPLC engages in some tricksy rhetoric to defend this criterion. Schlatter and Steinback argue that mental health organizations no longer consider homosexuality a mental disorder, which is true but has no relevance to the fact—which even the SPLC concedes—that homosexuals experience much higher rates of mental illness and drug and alcohol abuse than the general population.
What really sticks in the craw of the SPLC is that conservative organizations don’t agree with the unproven speculation by the SPLC and some social scientists that the reasons for the increased incidence of mental disorders and drug use are social stigma and “discrimination.”
Alleged falsehood about children raised by homosexuals
The SPLC deems hateful the claim that same-sex parents harm children. Potok and his minions don’t define harm and apparently reject a whole body of social science research that claims that children fare best when raised by a mother and father in an intact family. Even President Obama in his Mother’s Day and Father’s Day proclamations argued that both are essential to the welfare of children.
While homosexual activists revel in even the most poorly constructed social science research if it reinforces their presuppositions, they reject better constructed studies that undermine them. If organizations don’t accept the ever-fluid, controvertible, and highly politicized social science research that the SPLC favors, they go on the “hate group” list.
Alleged falsehood about persons who choose to leave homosexuality
If an organization claims that people can “choose to leave homosexuality,” it risks being added to the hate groups list. But there exist people who choose to stop engaging in homoerotic activity, and choose to leave homoerotic relationships, and choose no longer to place unwanted homoerotic attraction at the center of their identity. There are former homosexuals like Rosaria Butterfield and Michael Glatze who are now happily married to opposite-sex persons. How can making a true statement about the possibility that humans can make choices about their “sexual orientation” and identity be construed as a known falsehood or hateful?
Next time a feckless school board member or politician cites the Southern Poverty Law Center to discredit the Family Research Council, the American Family Association, or the Illinois Family Institute, do your level best to confront their ignorance and bigotry with truth.
