“In our polarized times, radicals use the SPLC’s hate-group designations to justify violence. Politicians and corporations use the designation to marginalize and punish good men and women. Not long ago the Family Research Council narrowly avoided mass murder when a man tried to attack its headquarters. He was inspired in part by the SPLC’s hate-group designation, and his plan was to shoot FRC employees and stuff Chick-fil-A sandwiches into their dead, bleeding mouths.” – David French, Senior Writer, National Review, July 13, 2017

Foxnews.com reports that

A prominent evangelical ministry has filed a federal lawsuit against the left-leaning Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), saying it defamed the Christian organization as an “active hate group” because it endorses the biblical view of homosexuality.

The clash marks the latest chapter in a growing feud between those who embrace historic monotheistic beliefs, whether Christian, Jewish or Muslim, and progressive activists who have begun targeting mainstream Christian groups that hold traditional beliefs about sex and other issues. 

Officials of the D. James Kennedy Ministries, based in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., accuse the SPLC of deceptive practices, saying that it wrongly asserts that some organizations breed or fuel hate because of their religious positions on such things as same-sex marriage and other social issues.

“It’s completely disingenuous to tag D. James Kennedy Ministries as a hate group alongside the KKK and neo-Nazis,” Kennedy Ministries spokesman John Rabe said to Fox News. “We desire all people, with no exceptions, to receive the love of Christ and his forgiveness and healing. We unequivocally condemn violence, and we hate no one.”

“It’s ridiculous for the SPLC to falsely tag evangelical Christian ministries as ‘hate groups’ simply for upholding the 2,000-year-old Christian consensus on marriage and sexuality,” Rabe said. “It’s nothing more than an attempt to bulldoze over those who disagree with them, and it has a chilling effect on the free exercise of religion in a nation built on that. We decided not to let their falsehoods stand.”

Kennedy Ministries filed the lawsuit Tuesday in the U.S. District Court in Montgomery, Ala., where the SPLC is headquartered.

The SPLC did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

SPLC critics say its original mission was a commendable one, setting out in 1971 to fight the Ku Klux Klan. The SPLC went after several Klan leaders, driving them into bankruptcy after court losses.

But increasingly, especially since Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election, both liberals and conservatives say that SPLC has grown overzealous – bringing down its huge and very high-profile “hate-group” hammer on not just people and organizations that actually encourage hate and violence against certain groups, but also on those who simply don’t fall in line with liberal positions on hot-button social issues.

“They deserve praise because they used the law to hurt the Klan — a lot,” said Scott Walter, president of Capital Research Center, a conservative think tank that monitors nonprofits. “But as often happens in the charity world, it concocts new ways to keep donations flowing.”

“Hate is the issue here,” Walter said. “When you talk about hate groups, you’re talking about a group that is a threat because of its violent tendencies and racism. If you go up to somebody on the street and ask ‘What is a hate group?’ that is what they would take it to mean.”

“It’s an outrageous lie that some mainstream Christian group is a threat in terms of violence and racism,” Walter said.

In a statement after the lawsuit was filed, the Kennedy Ministries president wrote: “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. After having given the SPLC an opportunity to retract, we have undertaken this legal action, seeking a trial by a jury of our peers, to preserve our own rights under the law and to defend the religious free speech rights of all Americans.”

So, just who is this bunch of foaming-at-the-mouth, snot-nosed Liberals known as the SPLC?

Per discoverthenetworks.org…

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) was founded in 1971 by two young Alabama lawyers, 35-year-old Morris Dees and 28-year-old Joseph Levin, Jr. The latter served as the Center’s legal director from 1971-76, but it was Dees who would emerge as the long-term “face” of the organization. A leftist who views the U.S. as an irredeemably racist nation, Dees, upon launching SPLC, joined forces with an African American who would serve as a perfect complement to him ideologically—the civil-rights activist Julian Bond.

Identifying itself as a “nonprofit civil rights organization” committed to “fighting hate and bigotry” while “seeking justice for the most vulnerable members of society,” SPLC describes the United States as a country “seething” with “racial violence” and “intolerance against those who are different.” “Hate in America is a dreadful, daily constant,” says the Center, and violent crimes against members of minority groups like blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals, and Arabs/Muslims “are not isolated incidents,” but rather, “eruptions of a nation’s intolerance.” To combat this epidemic of “bigotry,” SPLC dedicates itself to “tracking and exposing” the activities of “hate groups and other extremists throughout the United States.” Specifically, the Center’s “Hate & Extremism” initiative publishes its findings in SPLC’s Hatewatch blog and in its quarterly journal, the Intelligence Report, which claims to be “the nation’s preeminent periodical monitoring the radical right in the U.S.”

SPLC first gained widespread national recognition in 1987, its seventeenth year of activity, by winning a $7 million verdict in a civil lawsuit against the United Klans of America (UKA) for the role that organization had played in the death of a black Alabama teenager. By the time that lawsuit was filed, UKA was already a destitute, impotent, disintegrating entity that virtually all white Americans had emphatically rejected; the SPLC suit merely drove the final nail into the UKA coffin. SPLC boasts that it has likewise won “crushing jury verdicts” that effectively shut down groups like the White Aryan Resistance (with a $12 million judgment in 1991), the White Patriot Party militia, and the Aryan Nations (with a $6.5 million judgment in 2001).

This has been SPLC’s modus operandi since its inception: to initiate “innovative lawsuits” against prominent hate groups for crimes that their individual members commit. In these suits, declares Morris Dees proudly, “We absolutely take no prisoners. When we get into a legal fight we go all the way.” The leftist writer Ken Silverstein, who in 2000 wrote a penetrating exposé of SPLC for Harper’s magazine, notes that the targets of these suits tend to be “mediagenic villains” who are “eager to show off their swastikas for the news cameras.” As Dees and SPLC well understand, such figures stand the best chance of triggering an emotional public response that translates, in turn, into financial contributions from donors eager to combat the perceived threat.

Inflating the Numbers on “Hate”

As of 2016, SPLC identified 892 active “hate groups” in the United States. Asserting that the vast majority of such organizations are “right wing,” the Center says they include “the Ku Klux Klan,” “the neo-Nazi movement,” “neo-Confederates,” “racist skinheads,” “antigovernment militias,” “Christian Identity adherents,” and a variety of “anti-immigrant,” “anti-LGBT,” “anti-Muslim,” and “alternative Right” organizations. While also identifying a tiny smattering of black separatist entities as hate groups, SPLC takes pains to point out that black organizations must be judged by a different standard than their white counterparts, because “much black racism in America is, at least in part, a response to centuries of white racism.” SPLC contends that from 2000 to 2012, the number of hate groups in the U.S. increased by 67%—a surge allegedly “fueled by anger and fear over the nation’s ailing economy, an influx of non-white immigrants, and the diminishing white majority, as symbolized by the election of the nation’s first African-American president”—i.e., Barack Obama. In other words, white Americans’ reflexive bigotry allegedly triggered a host of hate-filled responses to the increased political and cultural influence wielded by nonwhites. And America’s racists, by SPLC’s calculus, are almost unanimously conservatives—as evidenced by the caption featured in the “Hatewatch” section of SPLC’s website: “Hatewatch monitors and exposes the activities of the American radical right.” The radical left gets no mention at all.

Before I get started with my analysis, please allow me this disclaimer:

I am a member of a Contemporary Evangelical Church, which I attend regularly, before I go to work on Sunday.

My faith is not marginal. I stand on The Solid Rock, not shifting sands.

America is a Constitutional Republic, not a Theocracy. And, as such, Americans, including the 75% of us who declare that Jesus Christ is our Personal Savior, must each make our own individual choice as to whom would best represent us as the Leader of the Free World, based upon both logic and the Spiritual Gift of Discernment.

Logic dictated that I vote on November 8, 2016 for someone who would keep my family, my friends, and my country safe from the murderous barbarians that are at our gates. It also drove me to choose someone who actually had a chance to defeat the Democrat Candidate, the representative of the political party whose sitting President at the time had driven this Sovereign Nation straight down the Highway to Hell, over the last seven years.

Judging from the Republican Primaries’ outcome, and the overflowing crowds at his Campaign Rallies that the MSM, to this day, refuses to acknowledge, the overwhelming majority of voters Between the coasts believed that candidate to be Donald J. Trump.

During the Republican Primary Season, I was called everything but “a Child of God”, simply because I wrote factual posts about Donald J. Trump and stated that I would pencil in the bubble beside his name as my choice to fill the Office of President of the United States of America.

According to Modern American Liberals, like the SPLC, who are still in the those of a National Temper Tantrum over Hillary Clinton’s loss, Bible-believing Christians are a “Hate Group”

I beg to differ.

Christianity is the faith of the overwhelming majority of Americans.

That being said, Christianity, the faith of the overwhelming majority of Americans has played a part not only in the birth of our nation, but also the shaping of its Domestic and Foreign Policies.

There was a time when Family Historical Records, such as births and deaths, were recorded in the Family Bible

In fact, SPLC, our Legal System was built on Judeo-Christian Principles.

To deny that fact is to attempt to rewrite history.

There is no such codicil in the Constitution of the United States of America as “The Separation of Church and State”.

Per the website, usconsitution.net,

One of the founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, is directly responsible for giving us this phrase. In his 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, then-President Jefferson used the phrase — it was probably not the first time, but it is the most memorable one. He said:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his god, [the people, in the 1st Amendment,] declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state.

Jefferson did not have a hand in the authoring of the Constitution, nor of the 1st Amendment, but he was an outspoken proponent of the separation of church and state, going back to his time as a legislator in Virginia. In 1785, Jefferson drafted a bill that was designed to quash an attempt by some to provide taxes for the purpose of furthering religious education. He wrote that such support for religion was counter to a natural right of man:

… no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.

Jefferson’s act was passed, though not without some difficulty, in Virginia. Eyler Robert Coates wrote that the act was copied in the acts or constitutions of several states, either in words or in concepts. Jefferson himself was in France by the time word of the act reached Europe, and he wrote back to America that his act was well-thought of and admired.

However, unlike the tyranny in England that our Founding Fathers escaped from, no one in this present free nation has ever been forced to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

And, that fact is extremely evident in some of the comments one sees on Facebook Political Pages and Political Websites.

But, I digress…

In recent times, especially under Former President, Barack Hussein Obama (mm mmm mmmm), a concerted effort was made to marginalize Christian Americans, putting us in a box if you will. in fact, a lot of Liberals and “libertarians” continue to believe that Christianity Americans should only practice our faith on Sunday Mornings from 9 – 12, and be seen and not heard the rest of week.

To which I personally answer, with two quotes from the Bible,

So Judas threw the money into the temple and left. Then he went away and hanged himself. – Matthew 27:5 (NIV)

…”Go and do likewise.” – Luke 10:37 (NIV)

And, boys and girls, that is MY right as an American.

For decades, American churches, like the black congregations in my hometown of Memphis, Tennessee, have invited local politicians to speak from their pulpits. While Modern American Liberals have had conniption fits over white churches around the country doing the same thing, they have not said a mumblin’ word about the actions of a constituency which historically votes Democratic.

Imagine that.

The Johnson Amendment was a violation of Christian Americans’ Constitutional Rights to begin with, whose selective enforcement has been an intentional act of self-serving hypocrisy by the Democratic Party.

The 45th President of the United States of America, Donald J. Trump, was exactly right in what he told a meeting of Evangelical Christians during the Presidential Campaign that:

They took away the voice of people that want to see good things happen. It’s not like they took away a bad voice, an evil voice. They took away a voice.

Last November that voice was heard loud and clear.

And now, just like the rest of their desperate Liberal Brethren and Sisters, the Southern Poverty Law Center is trying to bring down President Trump and his Base, including Evangelicals like myself, by accusing us of ‘HATRED, VIOLENCE, AND RAAACISM” because “Identity Politics” worked so well (/sarc) when they used it during the Presidential Campaign of Hillary Clinton.

One would have thought that the “Smartest People in the Room” would have learned from their defeat.

Until He Comes,

KJ