Focus On The Family Decries ‘Slander’ After Added To SPLC’s Hate List
Focus on the Family has joined a long list of conservative Christian ministries to receive a “hate group” designation by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
Specifically, the SPLC has labeled the Colorado Springs-based ministry an “anti-LGBTQ+ hate group” for its “biblical worldview strategy” that opposes same-sex marriage and affirms biological sexual identity.
“The organization’s online Daily Citizen demonizes LGBTQ+ people, claiming they are unnatural and un-Christian, and promotes anti-trans pseudoscience, such as conversion therapy that seeks to change their sexual or gender identities of LGBTQ youth,” the SPLC claims on its website.
But as the SPLC wrestles with mounting accusations that its hate lists are mere political hit lists, Focus on the Family is swinging back.
“The Southern Poverty Law Center has long listed so many of our good and hard-working friends … as hate ‘groups.’ But for some reason Focus on the Family was never listed among this august group,” wrote Focus on the Family’s director of global family formation studies, Glenn T. Stanton. “But now, all that has changed.”
In a statement reported by Colorado Politics, Focus on the Family President Jim Daly called the hate label “slander.”
“It really is a faux hate list — just because Christians believe there’s a natural order to marriage and creating families and gender doesn’t make you homophobic or intolerant,” Daly said. “It’s common-sense beliefs that have stood the test of time for millennia.”
Released in May, the 2024 hate list includes 1,371 groups. Among those listed as anti-LGBTQ+ are numerous Christian ministries, such as the Family Research Council, Alliance Defending Freedom and D. James Kennedy Ministries. The libertarian magazine Reason has criticized the SPLC as too eager to dish out the hate label, quipping in a 2023 article that its “notorious hate map might eventually describe everyone as an extremist.”
Daly suggested that the SPLC’s hate list has become just “a fundraising gimmick” that has “incited violence against innocent believers and fanned the very behaviors they claim they wish to combat.”
The latter claim seems to reference a 2012 incident in which a man shot a Family Research Council security guard while attempting a mass killing inspired by the SPLC hate group list.
Another concern for many conservative groups is the SPLC’s political clout and a push by some to revoke the tax-exempt status of the groups on its list.
One CBS News report, for example, lamented how “90 SPLC-designated hate groups that are also registered as charities received more than $1 billion in tax-deductible donations.”
In late 2023, U.S. Representative James Comer (R-Ky.), launched an investigation into the SPLC’s federal influence and the alleged “weaponizing” of its hate list to target conservatives.
More recently, the Family Research Council has drafted a petition calling on the Department of Justice “to immediately sever all ties with the Southern Poverty Law Center and formally renounce its influence on federal law enforcement and public policy decisions.”
This piece is republished from MinistryWatch.
Tony Mator is a Pittsburgh journalist, copywriter, blogger and musician who has done work for World magazine, The Imaginative Conservative and the Hendersonville Times-News, among others. Follow his work and observations at twitter.com/wise_watcher.