{"id":7579,"date":"2018-08-12T08:00:29","date_gmt":"2018-08-12T14:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/?p=7579"},"modified":"2024-09-23T22:54:11","modified_gmt":"2024-09-24T04:54:11","slug":"justice-department-cut-ties-splc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/justice-department-cut-ties-splc\/","title":{"rendered":"Justice Department Will Cut Ties to SPLC, Sessions Says"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2014 Published with Permission of TheNewAmerican.com \u2014<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Shortly after the\u00a0news broke<\/a>\u00a0that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) still maintained some ties to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) \u2014 a far-left fringe group\u00a0widely condemned as an anti-Christian \u201chate group\u201d by critics<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 Attorney General Jeff Sessions dropped the hammer. Speaking in front of a mainstream Christian group of pro-freedom attorneys maligned by the SPLC, the Justice Department chief pledged that the DOJ would not be partnering with any organizations that unfairly slander or discriminate against Americans for their faith. Everybody, including the SPLC, knew exactly who Sessions was talking about \u2014 the SPLC, of course.<\/p>\n

While the radical group has become increasingly discredited and marginalized in recent years, the attorney general’s comments may represent the final nail in the coffin for whatever credibility the SPLC might have still possessed among law enforcement. After all, this is an organization that\u00a0smeared a Muslim as a leading \u201canti-Muslim extremist<\/a>,\u201d\u00a0a black law professor as an enabler of white supremacy<\/a>, and a\u00a0Cherokee Indian married to a descendant of Sacajawea as the \u201cmatriarch\u201d of a vast \u201canti-Indian movement.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0But despite being ridiculed nationwide, with close to half a billion dollars stashed away, some of it in offshore accounts, the SPLC can still do a lot of damage.<\/p>\n

Sessions dropped the bombshell comments in a speech to the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). The influential organization of Christian attorneys has secured multiple victories at the U.S. Supreme Court including, most recently, while defending a Colorado baker from LGBT extremists in Colorado demanding that he bake them a pro-LGBT cake for a homosexual \u201cmarriage.\u201d Because of ADF’s position on sexuality \u2014 basically the traditional Christian view that people all over the world throughout virtually all of human history have held \u2014 the group has been libeled as a \u201chate group\u201d by the SPLC. But according to Sessions, the DOJ will no longer be helping the SPLC and the LGBT movement to terrorize Christians and other believers.<\/p>\n

Speaking at the ADF’s Summit on Religious Liberty, the U.S. attorney general gave encouragement to Christians everywhere. \u201cPeople of faith are facing a new hostility. Really, a bigoted ideology which is founded on animus towards people of faith,\u201d he explained. \u201cYou\u2019ll notice that they don\u2019t rely on the facts. They don\u2019t make better arguments.\u00a0 They don\u2019t propose higher ideals. No, they just call people names \u2014 like \u2018hate group.\u2019 Does that sound familiar?\u201d Sessions went on to suggest that the SPLC once did important work, pointing to its anti-KKK activities decades ago. But today, the group has gone off the rails.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I spoke to ADF last year, I learned that the Southern Poverty Law Center had classified ADF as a \u2018hate group\u2019,\u201d Sessions continued. \u201cMany in the media simply parroted it as fact. Amazon relied solely on the SPLC designation and removed ADF from its Smile program, which allows customers to donate to charities. They have used this designation as a weapon, and they have wielded it against conservative organizations that refuse to accept their orthodoxy and choose instead to speak their conscience. They use it to bully and intimidate groups like yours which fight for the religious freedom, the civil rights, and the constitutional rights of others.\u201d<\/p>\n

The SPLC was not amused. \u201cThe Alliance Defending Freedom spreads demonizing lies about the LGBT community in this country and seeks to criminalize it abroad,\u201d\u00a0claimed<\/a>\u00a0SPLC President Richard Cohen in an angry letter to the attorney general. \u201cIf the ADF had its way, gay people would be back in the closet for fear of going to jail. It\u2019s inappropriate for the nation\u2019s top law enforcement officer to lend the prestige of his office to this group. And it\u2019s ironic to suggest that the rights of ADF sympathizers are under attack when the ADF is doing everything in its power to deny the equal protection of the laws to the LGBT community.\u201d<\/p>\n

The SPLC refuses to accept that Christians, Jews, and Muslims take their scriptures seriously on the matter of homosexuality. Indeed, the SPLC is so radical that it\u00a0works to normalize and promote homosexuality to young children as part of its \u201cTeaching Tolerance\u201d program<\/a>. And it ruthlessly demonizes anyone who holds views held by virtually every society, culture, and religion in all of human history \u2014 namely, that homosexuality is unnatural and sinful, and that it is possible for people to leave behind that lifestyle.<\/p>\n

Despite the SPLC’s furious attack, Sessions was exactly right. As this magazine has documented extensively, the SPLC has increasingly been labeling everyone with whom it disagrees with some odious or noxious label. Practically everyone to the right of Obama and Bernie Sanders has been libeled as a hater, extremist, conspiracy theorist, or some other term. Indeed, even people who hold the same view on marriage that Obama claimed to hold when he ran for office have been described as \u201cradical right\u201d by the SPLC.<\/p>\n

The soft-spoken U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson, meanwhile, a harmless Christian and pediatric neurosurgeon, was smeared as an \u201cextremist\u201d by the SPLC for defending marriage. The John Birch Society, which publishes this magazine, has been\u00a0dubbed \u201cchief\u201d of the \u201cPatriot\u201d movement by the SPLC<\/a>, which uses the term Patriot in a derogatory manner. Countless other groups and individuals have also found themselves in the SPLC’s cross hairs simply for holding mainstream views shared by billions of people around the world and hundreds of millions of Americans.<\/p>\n

Ironically, perhaps, despite the smearing of everyone else, SPLC founder Morris Dees was accused in court documents of sexually abusing his stepdaughter.<\/a>\u00a0Separately, the SPLC hasshowered praise on a known communist terrorist whose Cuba-backed group bombed federal targets, slaughtered police, and more.<\/a>\u00a0Even\u00a0leading leftists are now speaking out against the money-making SPLC scam<\/a>.<\/p>\n

One Christian group maliciously labeled as a \u201chate group\u201d by the SPLC, the non-profit Family Research Council, found out the hard way how dangerous the SPLC’s propaganda can be. In 2012, the group’s Washington, D.C. headquarters was attacked by a deranged LGBT terrorist who was planning to massacre employees with a gun and then smear Chick-Fil-A sandwiches all over his victims’ faces. After being stopped by a heroic security guard and arrested,\u00a0the terrorist told the FBI that he had relied on SPLC’s hate propaganda<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Sessions explained that, even if he does not agree with ADF on everything, \u201cI wanted to come back here tonight partly because I wanted to say this: you are not a hate group.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sessions’ comments came\u00a0after the FBI, part of the DOJ, sparked a national outcry<\/a>\u00a0after it was revealed that the agency was still using the SPLC as a resource despite removing it from its website after previous scandals. Last month, Fox News host Tucker Carlson exposed the ongoing ties, with an FBI representative admitting that the agency still had some sort of \u201crelationship\u201d with the SPLC. Lawmakers were outraged. And the DOJ quickly sprang into action, promising that Sessions had ordered the FBI to review its relationship with such organizations to ensure that it does not partner with any group that \u201cdiscriminates.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his latest speech, Sessions confirmed that yet again, promising Americans that anti-Christian bigots would not have the ear of the nation’s justice system. \u201cI have ordered a review at the Department of Justice to make sure that we do not partner with any groups that discriminate,\u201d Sessions explained. \u201cWe will not partner with groups that unfairly defame Americans for standing up for the Constitution or their faith.\u201d The speech to ADF came about a week after\u00a0another fascinating speech by Sessions celebrating religious freedom<\/a>\u00a0and the enormous contributions made by Christians and other faithful.<\/p>\n

In both speeches, the attorney general also promised that the federal government would never attempt to force Americans to compromise their faith. \u201cIn all of this litigation and debate, this Department of Justice will never allow this secular government of ours to demand that sincere religious beliefs be abandoned,\u201d he told ADF. \u201cWe will not require American citizens to give intellectual assent to doctrines that are contrary to their religious beliefs. And they must be allowed to exercise those beliefs as the First Amendment guarantees. We will defend freedom of conscience resolutely. That is inalienable. That is our heritage.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sessions also announced last week the creation of the \u201cReligious Liberty Task Force.\u201d The body is designed to help DOJ protect religious liberty in the cases it litigates. While announcing the move, the attorney general also warned that \u201ca dangerous movement, undetected by many, is now challenging and eroding our great tradition of religious freedom.\u201d The decision was widely praised by Christians and others across the political spectrum, but extreme LGBT voices expressed outrage, saying Sessions was trying to give Christians a \u201clicense to discriminate\u201d by, for example, not having to affirm homosexual \u201cmarriages.\u201d Sessions also celebrated that nuns would no longer be coerced by the feds to buy birth control.<\/p>\n

Sessions’ recent actions and words were welcome news to embattled conservatives and Christians after eight years of attacks by Obama. But unfortunately, Sessions’ comments are actually a sign of how far the enemies of morality, liberty, and Western Christian civilization have come. It was not until 2003 that the Supreme Court unlawfully usurped the power to overturn anti-sodomy laws in Texas and all other states. By 2015, the out-of-control court invented a \u201cright\u201d to a \u201chomosexual marriage,\u201d in total violation of the Constitution, and sought to impose it on all Americans. By the end of Obama’s term,\u00a0government literally was terrorizing and jailing people who declined to affirm such \u201cmarriages.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

Sessions announcing that the DOJ would no longer partner with anti-religious bigots and discredited anti-Christian hate groups to bully and terrorize Christians is hardly a major victory. But hopefully, it will represent the first of many steps in the right direction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2014 Published with Permission of TheNewAmerican.com \u2014 Shortly after the\u00a0news broke\u00a0that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) still maintained some ties to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) \u2014 a far-left fringe group\u00a0widely condemned as an anti-Christian \u201chate group\u201d by critics\u00a0\u2014 Attorney General Jeff Sessions dropped the hammer. Speaking in front of a mainstream Christian […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":7582,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[564,618],"class_list":["post-7579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-jeff-sessions","tag-splc","cat-1-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7579"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7579\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16809,"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7579\/revisions\/16809"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}