President Joe Biden has made no bones about his advocacy for LGBTQ activism in the White House, but a shocking new video suggests his administration tapped an anti-Christian group for his “domestic terrorism” efforts.
In the fall of 2021, about nine months after President Joe Biden took office, the president of the Southern Poverty Law Center bragged in a donor meeting that many agencies in Biden’s administration had approached the center to craft a domestic terrorism strategy.
“I think there’s no question that we are unparalleled in our abilities to track and monitor the hate and extremist groups in the country, and I can tell you that we’ve had many agencies in the new Biden administration reaching out to solicit our expertise and our knowledge and information to help shape the policies that the new administration is adopting to counter the domestic terrorism threat,” Margaret Huang said in a fundraising event video first published by The Daily Signal.
This video should send shivers down the spines of American Christians.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has repeatedly demonized many teachings of orthodox Christianity as a form of “hate.” The organization gained its reputation by suing Ku Klux Klan groups into bankruptcy in the 1980s, then took the program it used against the KKK and weaponized it against mainstream conservative and Christian organizations.
The SPLC publishes a “hate map” that plots conservative Christian organizations like the Family Research Council and Alliance Defending Freedom alongside chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. The SPLC brands these groups “anti-LGBTQ hate groups,” claiming that they demonize people who identify as LGBTQ.
Contrary to the SPLC’s claims, neither FRC nor ADF demonize people for their sexual orientation or gender identity. They do, however, advocate for religious freedom and the biblical view of sexuality and the family.
ADF has won multiple Supreme Court cases defending the First Amendment rights of Christians who refuse to lend their artistic creativity to celebrate same-sex “weddings” because the Bible says marriage is between one man and one woman. The SPLC claims that ADF has supported criminalizing LGBTQ identity, a claim ADF has repeatedly denied.
FRC has advised former President Donald Trump and crafted policy to defend religious freedom and the family. The SPLC claims that FRC demonizes LGBTQ people, in part by warning that gay people are pedophiles. FRC has repeatedly denied these claims, and it emphatically does not maintain that most gay people prey on children.
Yet the SPLC’s worst attack arguably came against the Ruth Institute, a small nonprofit dedicated to helping the victims of the sexual revolution. The Ruth Institute publishes material warning that the sexual revolution has made life worse for many people and defends “traditional Christian sexual ethics.”
Yet the SPLC branded the Ruth Institute an “anti-LGBTQ hate group,” in part because the Ruth Institute’s founder, Jenifer Roback Morse, had cited the Catechism of the Catholic Church in saying that homosexual activity is “intrinsically disordered.”
So, will the FBI target conservative Christians for their faith? The bureau did publish a memo citing the Southern Poverty Law Center in warning against “radical traditional Catholic hate groups.” The Biden administration’s June 2021 strategy to combat domestic terrorism does not mention the SPLC, but the Biden administration’s many ties to the SPLC make Huang’s words rather plausible.
In March 2021, SPLC Chief of Staff Lecia Brooks claimed that “the Southern Poverty Law Center is not anti-Christian at all.” She mentioned that many churches and institutions that oppose “marriage equality” are not on the “hate map” and that “over 65% of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Staff identify as Christian.”
Brooks did not address why the SPLC demonized the doctrine of Catholicism and condemned opposition to LGBTQ activism as “hate,” however. Orthodox Christianity teaches that God created humans male and female, that marriage is between one man and one woman, and that homosexual activity is sinful. The SPLC may not demonize every Christian organization that holds to these teachings, but it has a track record of targeting mainstream Christian groups that do just that.
It is ironic that Biden’s administration would coordinate with the SPLC to oppose domestic terrorism. The SPLC’s “hate map” inspired an act of terror against the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C., and an SPLC lawyer currently faces domestic terrorism charges for his alleged role in a Molotov cocktail riot last March.
The SPLC’s scandals go beyond domestic terrorism. As I wrote in my book Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the SPLC fired its co-founder amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal in 2019. Amid that scandal, a former employee came forward calling the “hate” accusations a “highly profitable scam.”
The SPLC has no business advising the Biden administration on domestic terrorism, especially because of its record condemning traditional Christianity.
Tyler O’Neil is managing editor of The Daily Signal and the author of Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
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