The SPLC can also boast for being one of the nation’s top fund-raising machines. Between 2000 and 2003, SPLC contributions and interest totalled more than $127,000,000.

In recent years the SPLC has lost its focus, having run out of legitimate racist threats with which to scare their donor base into contributing. Indeed, FBI data that was collected by state and local law-enforcement agencies show a dramatic decrease in the number of hate crimes. In 1995, hate crimes totaled 7,974. In 2007, 12 years later, that number dropped by 4%, despite the fact that the US population rose 16% during that period.

While hate crimes are waning, at least according to the FBI, the SPLC tells a different story. Indeed, according to the SPLC’s latest Intelligence Report, there has been more than a 50% increase since 2000.

The law centre has supplemented the decline in actual hate groups by targeting Christian organizations and labelling them as such.

A NEW KIND OF “HATE GROUP”

For the last two years, Abiding Truth Ministries, has been included in the SPLC’s annual list of “hate groups.” When asked by reporters why a pro-family Christian ministry would be classed as a “hate group” alongside neo-Nazi organizations, spokesmen for the SPLC answered that it is because the President of Abiding Truth Ministries, Dr. Scott Lively, is also the co-author of The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party. This book is a well researched and factual analysis of the relationship between homosexuality and German fascism.

Working on the assumption that public disapproval of homosexuality leads inescapably to violence against homosexuals, the SPLC has been steadily adding other Christian ministries to their blacklist, including American Vision, the Chalcedon Foundation, Watchmen on the Walls, to name a few. In their criticisms of such ministries, it is not uncommon for the centre to make inflammatory and factual inaccurate claims, without any evidence or documentation.

Mimicking the smear campaigns that the pro-homosexual media has been waging against conservative Christians, the SPLC has also targeted specific individuals. For example, they went after Chief Justice Roy Moore because he refused to remove the Ten Commandment monument from the court house in Montgomery, Alabama. They have also criticized Pastor Douglas Wilson, a popular Christian speaker and writer on family issues, who has made no secret of his opposition to homosexual practice.

In their criticism of such individuals and groups, it is rare for the SPLC to give documented evidence to support their claims, relying instead on the power of emotion and false associations. For example, when Satender Singh was murdered in Sacramento, SPLC published an article linking the organization Watchmen on the Walls to the murder (the association was based on the fact that both the alleged perpetrator and the founder of Watchmen on the Walls are both Russian).

Even the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a highly respected forum of secular scholars promoting free market ideas in the Austrian tradition, met with the ire of the SPLC in summer 2003, when their Intelligence Report included it among “An array of right-wing foundations and think tanks support efforts to make bigoted and discredited ideas respectable.”

While the SPLC has been working over-time to portray the entire “Christian Right” as a network of dangerous “hate groups”, they have simultaneously attempted to preserve their status as an independent, non-partisan arbiter of the facts.SPLC thus forms a helpful case study for the tendency of American organizations known for tolerance to turn virulent in their attacks against Christians while still flying the banner of neutrality.

“Ultimately,” observed Gary DeMar, “the tactic is to strike fear in middle-America so the checks start rolling in. Most communities don’t see skinheads or even KKKers, but they do see D. James Kennedy on television, hear James Dobson on the radio, and listen to Gary DeMar at homeschool conventions. Hate has gone mainstream, the SPLC warns, so you better send a donation before these guys come and get you!...The SPLC is a fund raising industry designed to silence Christians. There’s not much money in fighting real hate groups now that only a few of the real haters are still around.”

DOUBLE STANDARD

While the SPLC purports to cover “hate” of all kinds, their website curiously omits any mention of the recent spate of hate-based attacks against Christians launched by the homosexual lobby in California.

In the vicious aftermath of Proposition 8 – a law that would prevent residents of California being forced to recognize same-sex marriage – homosexual blogs called for violence against Christians, some even issuing death threats and describing the types of weapons they would use in the murders. Many Christians received threats in the mail, while homosexual activists engaged in attacks specifically targeted against African Americans who voted overwhelmingly in favour of traditional marriage. Racist graffiti was found in the Los Angeles area, where swastikas, racial slurs and "Go Back To Africa" were spray-painted on sidewalks, houses and cars.

Such racist attacks were conveniently overlooked by the SPLC, even though they claim on their website that “The SPLC legal department fights all forms of discrimination...”

The SPLC also conspicuously omitted to mention the occasion when furious homosexual rioters invaded a church service, flinging propaganda and condoms around the sanctuary and then engaging in sexual exhibitionism at the pulpit.

The SPLC is also failing to comment on the persecution against Christians which the homosexual lobby is perpetrating even as I write. Their latest stunt is to use public records to identify and then harass supporters of traditional marriage. Online maps have been made available which give the names and location of all who donated to the Prop. 8 campaign, leading to numerous Christians losing their jobs and having their businesses boycotted. For example, a hostess at a Los Angeles Mexican restaurant was targeted for her $100 contribution in support of the measure. She was forced out of her job. A Sacramento theatre director and the director of the Los Angeles Film Festival were also forced out of their jobs because of contributing to the Prop. 8 campaign. Fearing boycotts, many employers are now having to release staff who donated to the Prop. 8 campaign.

Being a pawn of the homosexual lobby, it is not surprising that the SPLC has been curiously silent in these cases where actual hate really does exist.

To top it all, when Mark Potok of the SPLC was asked about a series of arson attacks against 10 churches in Alabama, he told the Los Angeles Times that he didn’t “see any evidence that these fires are hate crimes. Anti-Christian crimes are exceedingly rare in the South.”

CHANGING THE WAY WE THINK

The SPLC’s smear campaign against Christian organizations isn’t just one more outbreak in the growing hostility against those who believe in the Bible. Nor is the problem merely that the SPLC has a double standard (i.e., imagining that disapproval of same-sex sex equals hate and violence against homosexuals, while turning a blind eye to the actual violence arising from the ‘gay’ community). The real concern should be that the SPLC are attempting to change how Americans think about homosexuality and homosexuals.

Changing the way we think has long been a concern of the homosexual lobby. In their book After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the ‘90s, Kirk and Madsen, themselves influential exponents of the homosexual rights movement, revealed their master plan for orienting Western consciousness in favour of the homosexuality agenda. They do not hesitate to call their strategy “unabashed propaganda, firmly grounded in long-established principles of psychology and advertising.” Just as Hitler sought to bring the Aryan race to power by first presenting it as the victims of European Jewry, so Kirk and Madsen sought to bring homosexuals to power by first presenting themselves as victims.

Elsewhere in the same book, Kirk and Madsen wrote, “We mean conversion of the average American’s emotions, mind, and will, through a planned psychological attack, in the form of propaganda fed to the nation via the media.” This propaganda hinged on orienting the public to view homosexuals as a victim minority – a project which the emergence of AIDS seemed to make possible. “As cynical as it may seem,” the authors explained, “AIDS gives us a chance, however brief, to establish ourselves as a victimized minority legitimately deserving of America’s special protection and care. At the same time, it generates mass hysteria of precisely the sort that has brought about public stonings and leper colonies since the Dark Ages and before….How can we maximize the sympathy and minimize the fear? How, given the horrid hand that AIDS has dealt us, can we best play it?”

The SPLC are carrying on the project begun by Kirk and Madsen in re-conditioning how Americans think of the homosexual agenda. By presenting the homosexual cause as a ‘civil rights’ issue in a long pedigree that has also included women suffrage and the black vote, the SPLC are creating the subtle impression that homosexuals are an oppressed class. By juxtaposing ministries like Abiding Truth Ministries and American Vision alongside the Ku Klux Klan and the White Aryan Resistance, they are contributing to the impression that a Biblical view of marriage is the moral equivalent to racism, with the corollary that homosexuals are a victimized minority legitimately deserving special legal protection.