Here is Laurie Higgins writing at the Illinois Family Institute (for more on the Southern Poverty Law Center click here):
A refreshing and much-needed take-down of the ethically impoverished Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and its avaricious founder Morris Dees inspired me to recount IFI’s true story about our interaction with the blackguards who maintain the SPLC’s “hate groups” list.
While ignorant school board members in Illinois School District U-46 cite the SPLC to discredit the Illinois Family Institute (IFI), the FBI has stopped using the SPLC as a resource, and Cannon reports that the “most scathing assessments of Dees and his group have always come from the left. Stephen B. Bright, a Yale law professor and president of the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights, calls Dees a ‘shyster’ and a ‘con man.’”
In early March, 2009, which was about six months after I started working for IFI, we learned that IFI had been put on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) hate groups list.
Since IFI stands unequivocally opposed to both violence and hatred, we wondered why we were listed as an “anti-gay” hate group when other institutions like the Roman Catholic Church and many Protestant denominations that share our same views on matters related to homosexuality were not.
Why the SPLC first claimed IFI was put on its hate groups list
For clarification I called the SPLC and spoke with Heidi Beirich. Our conversation was troubling in that Ms. Beirich revealed that even a tenuous, distant connection to statements the SPLC doesn’t like will land an organization on their hate groups list.
Read more: Illinois Family Institute
Image credit: www.illinoisfamily.org.
