LAKE CHARLES, Louisiana—The Ruth Institute is gratified to see the FBI’s indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center. We have long been aware of the SPLC’s hate inflation: their indiscriminate slapping the “hate” label on organizations that oppose their preferred policy positions.
We did not know that the SPLC has also been in the hate manufacturing business. The FBI indictment provides evidence that the SPLC has been funneling large sums of money to white nationalist groups of the very sort they claim to oppose.
The Justice Department’s indictment states that the SPLC directed more than $1 million to an affiliate of the National Alliance; more than $300,000 to an affiliate of the Aryan Nations; as well as substantial sums to former Ku Klux Klan members and a member of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.
The Ruth Institute has been on the SPLC’s “hate map” since 2013 for promoting the Catholic Church’s traditional teaching on homosexual acts. As a result, our credit card processing company dropped us. Businesses refused to work with us. People scattered, thinking we were radioactive.
Many other conservative groups have been placed on the “hate map” with zero evidence that they had ever incited a single act of violence.
But what the Southern Poverty Law Center did to us was a mere inconvenience in comparison to the harm they have done to our country. The indiscriminate application of the “hate” label, the ratcheting up of rhetoric–all this has contributed to the polarized and toxic atmosphere we now experience.
God alone knows how much the Southern Poverty Law Center’s shameless hate-mongering has cost our country:
- Thoughtful policy discussions that could have been.
- Serious problems that might have been addressed.
- Friendships that could have formed.
- Millions of lost opportunities for collaboration.
We at the Ruth Institute hope that people of goodwill who took the SPLC’s claims at face value will reconsider. We’re grateful the federal government is investigating the SPLC. We hope and pray justice will be done.
