Family Research Council - Listing As A Hate Group By SPLC

Listing As A Hate Group By SPLC

The Southern Poverty Law Center designated the FRC as a hate group in the Winter 2010 issue of its magazine, Intelligence Report. As well as citing the statements made earlier in the year by Sprigg and Perkins as justification (see Statements on homosexuality), the SPLC described the FRC as a “font of anti-gay propaganda throughout its history”. As evidence, the SPLC cited a 1999 publication by the FRC, Homosexual Activists Work to Normalize Sex With Boys, which claimed: “one of the primary goals of the homosexual rights movement is to abolish all age of consent laws and to eventually recognize pedophiles as the ‘prophets’ of a new sexual order.” The report said FRC senior research fellows Tim Dailey (hired in 1999) and Peter Sprigg (2001) had both "pushed false accusations linking gay men to pedophilia".

FRC President Tony Perkins called the “hate” designation a political attack on the FRC by a "liberal organization". On December 15, 2010 the FRC ran an open letter advertisement in two Washington, D.C. newspapers disputing the SPLC's action; in a press release, the FRC called the allegation "intolerance pure and simple" and said it was dedicated to upholding "Judeo-Christian moral views, including marriage as the union of a man and a woman."' A section of the letter supporting the FRC and certain other organizations designated as hate groups by the SPLC had signers which included twenty members of the House of Representatives (including then soon-to-be Speaker John Boehner), three U.S. Senators, four state Governors, and one state Attorney General. The SPLC issued a response by Mark Potok in which he emphasized the factual evidence upon which the SPLC had taken the step of making the designation.

A shooting incident outside the FRC headquarters in 2012 (see below) prompted further comments on the SPLC's 'hate group' listing. Dana Milbank, columnist for the Washington Post, referred to the incident as "a madman’s act" for which the SPLC should not be blamed, but called its classication of the FRC as a hate group "reckless" and said that "it's absurd to put the group, as the law center does, in the same category as Aryan Nations, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Stormfront and the Westboro Baptist Church." Tufts University political science professor Jeffrey Berry described himself as "not comfortable" with the designation: "There's probably some things that have been said by one or two individuals that qualify as hate speech. But overall, it's not seen as a hate group."