Last week, the Southern Poverty Law Center announced it had fired co-founder and chief litigator Morris Dees. It’s still too early to tell exactly what led to the sudden end of the 82-year-old’s five-decade tenure, but the news puts a unique spotlight on the SPLC itself.
Even though it still wields outsized influence over powerful corporations like Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Twitter — and, alarmingly, even some elected officials — today’s SPLC bears little resemblance to the group Dees founded nearly 50 years ago.
Founded in 1971, the SPLC landed on the map thanks to Dees’ strategy of suing white supremacists in the 1980s. It did good work then, but it is now “more of a partisan progressive hit operation than a civil rights watchdog.”
Take Maajid Nawaz, for example. A former Islamic extremist, Nawaz now puts his life on the line by advocating for peaceful reform within Islam. Yet, in 2016, Nawaz faced heightened threats to his own life when the SPLC included him on its “Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists.”
Still a Muslim himself, Nawaz called upon the SPLC to retract its dangerous slander, which, like the SPLC’s “Intelligence Report” and “Hatewatch,” relies on baseless claims and mischaracterization. The SPLC wouldn’t budge. It took a threatened defamation lawsuit for SPLC finally to remove Nawaz from the list. Their slander cost them a $3.4 million settlement check and a public apology.
That episode is par for the course for the SPLC. In 2015, the discredited organization was forced to apologize to renowned neurosurgeon and now Housing and Urban Development Secretary Dr. Ben Carson for including him in its “Extremist Files” a year earlier.
Two years before that, an attempted mass murderer had stormed into the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the Family Research Council, a conservative group maligned by the SPLC with its “hate group” label, carrying a firearm and 15 Chick-fil-A sandwiches. His goal was to kill as many FRC employees as possible and smear their faces with the sandwiches. He told the FBI that his choice of target had been inspired by SPLC’s designation of FRC as a “hate group.”
Despite the obvious connection between the shooter and the SPLC’s malicious slander, the center Dees founded has still refused to remove FRC from its list of over 1,000 entries that intentionally lumps in a handful of mainstream conservative organizations with scattered remnants of the Ku Klux Klan and other vile groups.
Across the hall from FRC at the time was the headquarters of Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal advocate that has since also landed on the SPLC’s “hate group” list for our work litigating religious freedom, life, and marriage and family issues. We were given this designation by the SPLC even as we were earning nine victories at the U.S. Supreme Court since 2011.
Over the course of the past two years, ADF has repeatedly had to refute the SPLC’s baseless slanders and fend off the group’s incessant efforts to cut ADF off from funding sources. This requires us to expend valuable resources to defend others who are targeted and maligned by the SPLC simply for participating in ADF events.
While the SPLC’s crusade to marginalize ADF has thankfully not yet resulted in any further violence, it has been destructive nonetheless. By its own logic, it won’t be long until the SPLC takes to demonizing liberal groups like the ACLU, which has long participated in panels hosted by ADF.
In fact, the ACLU’s former president, Nadine Strossen, recently rebuked the SPLC for its attempt to marginalize ADF, admonishing that the group’s abuse of the “hate group” label “suppresses conversations we need to have and voices that should be heard.”
It’s long past time to treat the SPLC as it has now treated its founder: Show them the door. After all, if we want a world where everyone’s voices can be heard without threat of violence or marginalization, we may not have another choice.
Jay Hobbs is deputy director of media communications for Alliance Defending Freedom.
