Several groups listed as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) got millions in government-backed Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans, money intended for businesses with 10 or fewer employees that have been harmed by the ongoing COVID-19 epidemic.
The groups include the anti-Muslim organization The Center for Security Policy; the two anti-immigrant groups, the Center for Immigration Studies and the Federation for American Immigration Reform; and three rabidly anti-LGBTQ groups, the American Family Association (AFA), Liberty Counsel and the Pacific Justice Institute (PJI).
According to the SPLC, all three groups regularly fight against LGBTQ civil rights. The PJI has said gay marriage would lead to legalized polygamy and incest, LGBT History Month in schools promotes gay pornography, and compared gay marriage to Nazism.
Spokespeople for the Liberty Counsel have called homosexuality immoral, unnatural, and self-destructive; called same-sex marriage “destructive to individuals and … our very social fabric,” has said gay marriage would lead to a “rampant increase in diseases,” and have called LGBTQ rights a “direct assault on our religious freedom and freedom of speech.” The group is currently suing a Connecticut school board in order to ban transgender students from participating in high school sports.
The Liberty Counsel received somewhere between $350,000 and $1 million from the PPP program, and the Pacific Justice Institute received between $150,000 and $350,000.
The AFA has called transgender people sexual predators and child molesters, declared homosexuality as hazardous to one’s health, said Islam is a religion of intolerance and war, and claimed that gay men were responsible for “Adolph Hitler… the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine and six million dead Jews.”
“Many of these groups that traffic in hate are already well-resourced, with a constant injection of funding from far-right mega-donors and dark money foundations,” Imraan Siddiqi, executive director of the Arizona branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said to the Center for Media and Democracy.
“This just highlights more cases of vital funding getting into the hands of those who didn’t need it, while many small businesses in our communities came up empty and are having to fold,” Siddiqi added.