Yesterday, I was very happy that Dana Milbank noticed that most of the hyperventilating in the Presidential campaign was coming from the Republican side. Today, he was back to writing columns without doing research, and this produced a blogpost at National Review Online by Maggie Gallagher titled "Dana Milbank: ‘NOM Is Right’ on SPLC". What's at issue? The Southern Poverty Law Center's designation of some of the anti-gay organizations as "hate groups." Yep! Blaming the SPLC and the Human Rights Campaign for the shooting at the Family Research Council.
To Milbank's credit, he doesn't do this although he comes dangerously close:
The Family Research Council’s president, Tony Perkins, said Thursday that “Corkins was given a license to shoot an unarmed man by organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center.” This goes too far. . . . Late Thursday, the law center fired back at Perkins, defending its categorization of the FRC as a hate group because it “has knowingly spread false and denigrating propaganda about LGBT people.” The center said that Perkins should stop putting out “claims that are provably false” about gay people. Yes, Perkins should stop doing that. But even if he doesn’t, the Southern Poverty Law Center should stop listing a mainstream Christian advocacy group alongside neo-Nazis and Klansmen.
I figured I should probably go to the SPLC to see what their definition of "hate groups was. Lo and Behold!
A page on the anti-gay groups with an explanation. Of course not all the religious conservative groups are on the list that can be considered hate groups, and there are specific reasons why those that
are on the list are on the list. Below the fleur-de-Kos for details.
Here is SPLC's explanation of what qualifies an anti-gay group as a hate group:
Even as some well-known anti-gay groups like Focus on the Family moderate their views, a hard core of smaller groups, most of them religiously motivated, have continued to pump out demonizing propaganda aimed at homosexuals and other sexual minorities. These groups’ influence reaches far beyond what their size would suggest, because the “facts” they disseminate about homosexuality are often amplified by certain politicians, other groups and even news organizations. Of the 18 groups profiled below, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) will be listing 13 next year as hate groups (eight were previously listed), reflecting further research into their views; those are each marked with an asterisk. Generally, the SPLC’s listings of these groups is based on their propagation of known falsehoods — claims about LGBT people that have been thoroughly discredited by scientific authorities — and repeated, groundless name-calling. Viewing homosexuality as unbiblical does not qualify organizations for listing as hate groups.
Since the Family Research Council is on the list (incidentally, this was published in a Winter 2010 report - interesting that they wait over a year to complain), I went to see what SPLC thought qualified the FRC for inclusion, and voila:
Headed since 2003 by former Louisiana State Rep. Tony Perkins, the FRC has been a font of anti-gay propaganda throughout its history. It relies on the work of Robert Knight, who also worked at Concerned Women for America but now is at Coral Ridge Ministries (see above for both), along with that of FRC senior research fellows Tim Dailey (hired in 1999) and Peter Sprigg (2001). Both Dailey and Sprigg have pushed false accusations linking gay men to pedophilia: Sprigg has written that most men who engage in same-sex child molestation “identify themselves as homosexual or bisexual,” and Dailey and Sprigg devoted an entire chapter of their 2004 book Getting It Straight to similar material. The men claimed that “homosexuals are overrepresented in child sex offenses” and similarly asserted that “homosexuals are attracted in inordinate numbers to boys.”
Smoking gun. There are five more paragraphs and I urge you to read them.
Maggie complains that FRC (and NOM, for that matter) shouldn't be on a list with Stormfront and the KKK. Details, details, details. NOM is on the list because of its connection with Robert George and the Manhattan Declaration, although the SPLC has observed that Brian Brown has softened NOM's rhetoric quite a bit.
So, Dana. Maybe you should check before you excuse hate groups from being called hate groups because you don't find the people who speak for them hateful. Are you not familiar with the fact that people lie?