Southern Poverty Law Center's divisive tactics (letter)

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Letters to the Editor

To the editor:

In today’s fast-moving media environment, it’s easy to see how well-meaning reporters and editors can overlook a detail or assume the validity of a well-traveled claim.

This was the case in a March 23 article published at Inside Higher Ed. In an otherwise solid and factual report entitled “Law Students Shout Down Controversial Speakers,” reporter Josh Moody detailed the disgraceful scene of Yale Law School students imposing an unseemly heckler’s veto on my colleague at Alliance Defending Freedom, Kristen Waggoner, and her co-panelist, Monica Miller of the American Humanist Association.

I won’t belabor the details of this unsettling event, as Mr. Moody does an excellent job in his coverage. But I will point out to readers that Mr. Moody makes one foundational error regarding ADF and the public smear campaign currently waged against us by the thoroughly discredited, internally corrupt, and deeply partisan Southern Poverty Law Center.

For decades, many prominent voices have been warning that SPLC has become “more of a partisan progressive hit operation than a civil rights watchdog.” Current Affairs’ editor Nathan J. Robinson described SPLC’s “Hate Map” as an “outright fraud” and “willful deception” and SPLC itself as “everything that’s wrong with liberalism.” Shikha Dalmia has said that SPLC is wrongly focused on “enforcing liberal orthodoxy against its intellectual opponents.” SPLC was even forced to pay over $3 million to settle a threatened defamation lawsuit over its slander.

Yet, despite this, Mr. Moody writes that ADF has “earned” the spurious “hate group” designation from the SPLC and that ADF “has long been criticized for social views that demonize the LGBTQ+ community.”

The opposite is true. It is the SPLC that seeks to demonize those who hold views about marriage and human sexuality with which they disagree. That is why they place such groups and individuals on their “Hate Map.” ADF supports orthodox Christian teaching on marriage, sexuality, and the nature of the human person. Our beliefs are consistent with Biblical, historical understandings of Christianity, held by all major denominations including Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant and adhered to by billions worldwide. Accordingly, we support laws and policy positions in line with these beliefs. Over the years – in keeping with the shrill cancel culture that has taken hold in the U.S. – those who disagree with our policy positions have deliberately sought to mischaracterize, smear, and outright lie about our work in order to silence debate on these issues. SPLC is the most prominent example.

ADF’s 13 wins at the U.S. Supreme Court just since 2011 should be proof enough to any skeptic that our views are well within the mainstream. We have another important free speech case before the Court in the coming term, and Ms. Waggoner was invited to the Yale Law School event because she successfully argued a recent campus free speech case before the Court—one in which the American Humanist Association filed a brief supporting ADF’s client.

Strikingly, none of this context was included in Mr. Moody’s reporting. Neither was the concerning connection between SPLC’s rhetoric and threatening and violent behavior on college campuses and beyond. In just the last decade, students at Yale and Middlebury College have cited SPLC statements as a reason for boisterous and violent shout downs of campus speakers and Floyd Corkins cited SPLC claims as motivation for his attempted mass murder at Family Research Council. These are major omissions to an otherwise thorough report. Inside Higher Ed’s readers deserve the full context so they can come to their own conclusions about the conduct and motivation of the student disruptors at Yale.

--Jeremy Tedesco
Senior counsel and senior vice president of corporate engagement
Alliance Defending Freedom.

Editorial Tags: 

Academic freedom

Free speech

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