After exhausting non-legal approaches, D. James Kennedy Ministries (DJKM) filed a lawsuit against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the charity organization GuideStar, and Amazon for defamation, religious discrimination, and trafficking in falsehood. This comes in the wake of a widely publicized ‘hate group’ map that identified numerous Christian organizations as hate groups along with radical Muslim groups.
To make matters more untenable, the mainstream media sees the SPLC as the authority on what comprises a hate group. The charity site, GuideStar, and Amazon make the same mistake as well.
GuideStar adopted the SPLC “hate group” list in June and ABC, NBC, and CNN followed suit.
The SPLC used the white nationalist riots in Charlottesville as a springboard for a massive fundraising operation. J.P. Morgan pledged $1 million to the group, as did George Clooney and his wife Amal.
Tim Cook, CEO of Apple was even more generous. He announced his company would give $1 million to the SPLC, that it would match any donations from employees at a two-to-one rate, and that Apple would set up a system in iTunes software to enable consumers to directly donate to the organization.
Both Christian organizations and moderate Muslim groups like the Quilliam Foundation have said enough is enough.
“We embarked today on a journey to right a terrible wrong,” said Dr. Frank Wright, president, and CEO at DJKM. “Those who knowingly label Christian ministries as ‘hate’ groups, solely for subscribing to the historic Christian faith, are either woefully uninformed or willfully deceitful. In the case of the Southern Poverty Law Center, our lawsuit alleges the latter.”
The SPLC labeled DJKM as an “anti-LGBT hate group” because of its opposition to same-sex marriage and transgenderism. “These false and illegal characterizations have a chilling effect on the free exercise of religion and on religious free speech for all people of faith,” declared Wright.
The Southern Poverty Law Center’s “hate group” lists and “hate map” unfairly target mainstream conservatives and even some liberals. Now, some of the groups slandered by this organization have begun to fight back.
“The SPLC, who made their money suing the KKK, were set up to defend people like me, but now they’ve become the monster that they claimed they wanted to defeat,” Maajid Nawaz, a British politician, and founder of the anti-Islamist organization the Quilliam Foundation, declared in a video in which he announced his lawsuit against the SPLC for defamation.
“They have named me, alongside Ayaan Hirsi Ali, on a list of ‘Anti-Muslim Extremists,'” Nawaz said. “I am suing the SPLC for defamation and I need your help to win.”
The charity rating website GuideStar marked dozens of nonprofits as “hate groups,” using data from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). GuideStar bills itself as “neutral” and as the world’s largest source of information about nonprofits.
Among those groups listed by the SPLC is the Family Research Council (FRC), a Christian organization. Ironically, the Family Research Council was attacked by a domestic terrorist in 2012 who admitted in court that he used the SPLC “hate group” list to target FRC.
“We understand where this hate labeling can lead because we’ve experienced it,” said Lt. Gen. William “Jerry” Boykin, executive vice president of the FRC. He insists that the SPLC list is a political attack and that the 2012 violence is a natural result of such labeling.
“All they are is a political arm of the extreme Left — they go after conservative groups,” explained the FRC executive director.
The SPLC also lists the American Family Association (AFA), Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the American College of Pediatricians, and the Center for Immigration Studies as hate groups.
The SPLC “throws in the Klu Klux Klan and organizations like that which are all radical and dangerous,” Boykin noted, but they also use the list to target their political opponents. “They come after us because of our politics, not because we could legitimately be considered an organization that advocates violence or spews hate.”
Far too many journalists quote SPLC as a credible source, rather than the politically motivated fund-raising machine it is.
~ American Liberty Report
