Family Research Council Labels Noted Civil Rights Group A Terrorist Organization

var addthis_config = {“data_track_addressbar”:true};Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, in an email to supporters late last night decided to label the highly-respected Southern Poverty Law Center a terrorist organization. The SPLC is best known as the group of Montgomery, Alabama attorneys who took the KKK to court, ultimately reducing them from a group of domestic terrorists numbering up to six million to a small handful of a few thousand.

Today, the Southern Poverty Law Center monitors the activities of well-over one thousand hate groups — including the Family Research Council.

In order to be placed on the SPLC’s list of active hate groups, an organization has to demonstrate repeated intention to spread lies and falsehoods about a group of people. That is the definition of the Family Research Council.

“The United States may not negotiate with terrorists, but it certainly hasn’t minded using curriculum tied to them in official Army briefings,” Perkins wrote last night.

He is referring to a series of articles by debunked Fox News religion reporter Todd Starnes, who has published several articles claiming the U.S. Military, in training classes on understanding and recognizing extremism, listed the Family Research Council and the American Family Association as hate groups.

Since the Family Research Council and the American Family Association are hate groups, the military had every legitimate right to name them as such, but since that designation came from the Southern Poverty Law Center, Perkins is now labeling them “terrorists” — even on Twitter:

The US may not negotiate with terrorists, but it certainly hasn’t minded using curriculum tied to them in official Army briefings. #SPLC

— Tony Perkins (@tperkins) January 8, 2014

The US may not negotiate with terrorists, but it certainly hasn’t minded using curriculum tied to them in official Army briefings. #SPLC

— Tony Perkins (@tperkins) January 8, 2014

 

How Does the Army Spell Extremism? S-P-L-C http://t.co/5KhSH4jKCd

— Tony Perkins (@tperkins) January 8, 2014

 

Perkins is also blaming the SPLC for the shooting by Chick-fil-A-carrying Floyd Lee Corkins at the Family Research Council’s Washington, D.C. headquarters:

Despite being linked in federal court to a case of domestic terrorism, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has been a go-to “source” of the Obama Pentagon in a string of military training sessions.

The Southern Poverty Law Center is the nation’s premier authority on extremism and hate groups of all types: anti-gay, neo-Nazi, Klansmen, white nationalists, neo-Confederates, racist skinheads, black separatists, border vigilantes, anti-government “Patriot” groups, militias, Anti-Muslim, Holocaust Deniers, Anti-Immigrant, and many more.

GLAAD’s Commentator Accountability Project (CAP) offers startling statements from Perkins. A sampling:

Facts

— Says about gay people: “They are intolerant. They are hateful. They are vile. They are spiteful”…”pawns” of the “enemy.” (See 1:30 mark.)

— Lumps together Aurora shooting, kidnapping, and openly gay soldiers as three examples of a “nation gone under”

— Says many gays have an “emptiness within them” (:55) because they are “operating outside of nature” (1:09)

— Says that gay young people “have a higher propensity to depression or suicide because of that internal conflict; homosexuals may recognize intuitively that their same-sex attractions are abnormal.”

— Despite what health experts have said, insists that pedophilia is “a homosexual problem.”

— The Family Research Council has distributed a pamphlet that claims gay men are more likely to molest children, and supports “reorientation therapy” for gay people

— The Family Research Council has distributed a pamphlet that begins by likening the logic behind same-sex marriage to the logic behind man-horse marriage (complete with horse graphic)

– Compares gay legal advocates to terrorists (at 0:31 mark): “[B]ack in the 80s and early 90s, I worked with the State Department in anti-terrorism and we trained about 50 different countries in defending against terrorism, and it’s, at its base, what terrorism is, it’s a strike against the general populace simply to spread fear and intimidation so that they can disrupt and destabilize the system of government. That’s what the homosexuals are doing here to the legal system.”

Jeremy Hooper at Good As You last night noted that “the far-right anti-LGBT organizations hate nothing more than their own words. If the past two years have proven any axiom to be true, it’s this one. Time and time again, we see that all one has to do to really enrage a far-right anti-LGBT activist is to say, “Hey, look at this stuff you said” and ask him or her to take responsibility for it… And sometimes, when they get really Jesus-y? They equate those messengers with terrorists.”

Instead of pointing the finger at the SPLC and wrongly calling them “terrorists,” perhaps Perkins should mend his ways and stop allowing his organization to continue to act as a hate group.

Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr

Previously:

Tony Perkins Slams Pro-LGBT Priest As ‘False Prophet’ Who ‘Encourages Those Who Do Evil’

Tony Perkins Wages War On ENDA: Gay People ‘Want To Put Their Bedroom In The Workplace’

Tony Perkins: Christians Must Buy Guns Because Democrats Won’t Force Americans To Pray