This morning, activist Hannah Scherlacher of ultra-conservative Leadership Institute’s campus reform program went to Fox News to tell them how she has been egregiously abused by the Southern Poverty Law Center, who she says, “labelled her an LGBT-hater,” and put her on a “hate list” when all she did was appear on Family Research Council Radio. What really happened was that Southern Poverty Law Center regularly posts a media guide called “Anti-LGBT Roundup of Events and Activities.” In the posting covering the weeks of July 13 through the 31st, Scherlacher was listed as number 22 in a list of guests on FRC radio. There is no resemblance whatsoever between this routine media TV-guide-like post and the SPLC list of anti-LGBT hate groups. Scherlacher is claiming that the two are one and the same, which is laughable. Even more laughable is the piece she wrote for the Fox News website:
Nazi. Fascist. Misogynist. White supremacist. These are some of the most hateful terms around, and yet they are freely lobbed at anyone who even slightly diverges from the left’s worldview. This fall, I became the one targeted by exactly this sort of bullying at the hands of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
It’s an understatement to say that I was dumbfounded as to how I ended up on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) LGBTQ hate-list — I have never said or done anything to indicate hate for the LGBTQ community. When I called to inquire, SPLC informed me that I am guilty because I did a radio interview with Family Research Council Radio (FRC). The segment was about socialism, but because FRC holds traditional family values, I was labeled an LGBT-hater just for being a guest on the show. No LGBT topics even came-up.
SPLC’s hate-list exemplifies a bullying tactic employed by the left to silence conservative ideas. Regardless of the issue, support for the conservative point of view results in a litany of hateful labels and reputation-smearing. The goal is to paint any opposition to the far left as morally depraved and, therefore, unworthy of being included in conversation. Dr. Carol Swain, an African-American woman and former Vanderbilt professor, is a perfect case-in-point; she was labeled a white supremacist sympathizer by the SPLC for pointing-out SPLC’s hypocrisy on racial issues. [...]
I am calling on SPLC to remove me from this list and stop engaging in the game of identity fear politics. I urge all Americans who have been bullied, silenced, and pushed into a corner by radical groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center to push back too.
This is just the latest salvo in a war that was declared against SPLC, labelled ”an attack dog of the left” by the Family Research Council, which wrote an open letter to the media September 6, signed by 47 right wing leaders and media groups, which stated that the SPLC is a “discredited left wing political activist organization that seeks to silence its political opponents with a hate group label of its own invention that is not only false and defamatory but that also endangers the lives of those that are targeted with it.”
The handwriting is on the wall that the Family Research Council, which is homophobe Louisiana televangelist Tony Perkin’s mouthpiece, fears and hates the good offices of the SPLC.
As to charges of falsehood and defamation, specifically what the SPLC did was to list Scherlacher as a guest on a radio show and nothing more. To wildly distort that routine mention, number 22 on a list of less than 30, with being “smeared” by the SPLC and placed on a hate list, is epic conflation and a downright lie.