[Editor's note: This story originally was published by The Daily Signal.]
By Tyler O'Neil
The Daily Signal
The Left’s main smear organ has targeted an openly gay organization and groups of doctors who oppose “gender-affirming care” in efforts to silence opposition to the transgender agenda and drag queen story hours.
The Southern Poverty Law Center released its “Year in Hate and Extremism” report Tuesday, warning about encroaching “theocracy” and an “authoritarian takeover” as part of the “organizational infrastructure … upholding white supremacy in the United States.”
As I explain in my book, “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC gained fame by suing the Ku Klux Klan into bankruptcy. It later took the project it used to monitor the Klan and weaponized it against mainstream conservative and Christian nonprofits, putting them on a “hate map” along with Klan chapters.
On Tuesday, the SPLC raised the alarm about having “documented 86 active anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups—about 33% higher than 2022, and the highest number ever recorded by the SPLC.”
Of course, the SPLC isn’t “documenting” these “hate groups”—it’s smearing organizations by comparing them to the real hate of the Klan. By warning about the “increase” of “anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups,” it is ratcheting up the alarmist rhetoric and demonizing Americans who dare to dissent from its transgender agenda. It’s also scaring donors into ponying up cash in what a former SPLC employee described as a “highly profitable scam.”
Most of the increase in its count of “anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups” comes from the SPLC’s decision to add state-based family policy councils, groups of doctors who oppose transgender medical interventions, and chapters of the group Gays Against Groomers to the list. These groups don’t support “hate”—they merely oppose the SPLC’s agenda.
The SPLC added to the list policy groups that oppose radical laws to promote transgender identity. These groups support legislation to ensure that males cannot enter women’s restrooms, locker rooms, and prisons in the name of gender identity; legislation to protect children from “gender-affirming care” that may sterilize them; and legislation to prevent schools from hiding children’s “transgender” identity from parents.
These new “hate groups” are: Advocates Protecting Children in Virginia, the California Policy Council, the Center for Christian Virtue in Ohio, the Child and Parent Rights Campaign in Georgia, the Family Action Council of Tennessee, the Florida Family Policy Council, Frontline Policy Council in Georgia, the Louisiana Family Forum, Massachusetts Family Institute, the Montana Family Foundation, Pennsylvania Family Institute, and the Family Foundation of Virginia.
SPLC headquarters in Montgomery, Alabama
The SPLC also demonized groups of doctors who oppose experimental “transgender” medical interventions. These interventions, euphemistically referred to as “gender-affirming care,” involve drugs to block puberty, cross-sex hormones to make males seem female and vice versa, and surgeries to remove healthy reproductive organs. While much of the medical industry has been captured by gender ideologues who champion these interventions, many brave doctors have spoken out against them. Now, they find themselves on a map with the Klan in a report on “white supremacy.”
These groups include Do No Harm, Genspect, Partners for Ethical Care, and the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine.
The “Year in Hate” report also cites another report the SPLC released last year that demonized opposition to transgender orthodoxy as “pseudoscience” and a tool of “theocracy.”
In an ironic twist of fate, the SPLC also added an explicitly homosexual group to the anti-LGBTQ+ category this year: Gays Against Groomers. The group began as a Twitter account created by Jaimee Michell, and according to the SPLC, it has four chapters. The headquarters in Milwaukee has three offshoots in Missouri, North Carolina, and Washington.
Michell started Gays Against Groomers to warn against the sexualization of children and to highlight the fact that not all people who identify as LGBTQ+ support sexual lessons and events geared toward kids. The SPLC condemns Gays Against Groomers for making “amplifying anti-trans and anti-drag messaging key to its online and in-person activity.”
The SPLC dismisses any concern that LGBTQ+ lessons and events might sexualize children and make them vulnerable to abuse. In fact, the report on “Hate and Extremism” trumpets the phenomenon referred to as “Drag Queen Story Hour,” in which scantily clad men in exaggerated feminine dress and makeup read books to children.
“Drag, which often challenges strict adherence to binary gender roles, poses a problem for hate and antigovernment groups because it offers freedom from the restrictive ideologies they espouse,” the SPLC’s R.G. Cravens claims.
He also argues that “drag performs an important role in American democracy in addition to its artistic value,” because “drag artists” can use their platform to “educate people on the importance of voting and other forms of democratic engagement.”
Cravens never admits the sexualized nature of Drag Queen Story Hour. Instead, he demonizes opposition to it by suggesting that it is rooted in hatred. He claims that “the activities of anti-LGBTQ+ groups overlapped with white nationalist, neo-Nazi, antisemitic, and antigovernment groups who targeted LGBTQ+ people and events for intimidation and violent campaigns designed to drive LGBTQ+ people from public life.”
He also suggests that any criticism of drag’s hyper-sexualized interpretation of femininity is rooted in knuckle-dragging misogyny.
“By upending the notion that women are inherently feminine and men are inherently masculine, for example, drag challenges long-held sexist notions that women are a ‘weaker sex’ who should be subservient to men because they are only valuable for procreation,” Cravens writes.
Cravens claims the SPLC tracked “195 incidents of right-wing protesters targeting drag events across the country” in 2023, suggesting these protests were violent. He mentions isolated incidents of real violence unconnected to any of the mainstream organizations the SPLC brands “anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups.”
The SPLC again kept many mainstream conservative Christian groups on the list of “anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups,” most notably the law firm Alliance Defending Freedom and the think tank Family Research Council.
Alliance Defending Freedom has won numerous cases at the U.S. Supreme Court, including free speech and religious freedom cases like 303 Creative v. Elenis and Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. Even Alliance Defending Freedom’s ideological opponents, such as former American Civil Liberties Union President Nadine Strossen, have condemned the SPLC’s smear against the law firm.
Both Alliance Defending Freedom and the Family Research Council have repeatedly debunked the SPLC’s accusations against them, yet the SPLC continues to repeat its claims.
In 2012, the Family Research Council suffered a terrorist attack from a man who used the SPLC “hate map” to target the organization. While the SPLC condemned the attack, it has kept the Family Research Council on the map.
Last year, the SPLC added parental rights groups—including Moms for Liberty—to the “hate map,” in part because they oppose transgender lessons in school.
The SPLC has suffered many scandals. It paid more than $3 million to settle a defamation lawsuit from a Muslim reformer the SPLC had branded an “anti-Muslim extremist” in 2018. It fired its co-founder, Morris Dees, amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal in 2019. Even so, many legacy media outlets, Democrats, and companies use the SPLC as an arbiter of what is considered “hate.” The Biden administration has repeatedly worked with the SPLC, with a Justice Department division listening to an SPLC briefing on the “hate map.”
The SPLC owes its bread and butter to demonizing conservatives, and no one should take its claims at face value.
