Another conservative gives a poor defense of SPLC anti-gay hate groups

Another conservative recently tried to defend religious right groups designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as hate groups.

And like the others, she failed miserably.

Rebecca Hagelin, a member of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank (Washington, D.C. seems to collect think tanks like a dog collects fleas) gave her opinion of the controversy in a Town Hall column, Culture Challenge of the Week: Playing the Hate Card.

You can read it if you, but allow me to break it down. The following opening is the gist of the entire column:

Children know instinctively that “hate” is a bad thing. And they understand that hating a classmate, teacher, or neighbor is nothing like “hating” the broccoli on the dinner plate. Real hate is a deliberate choice: it wishes evil and foments dark, angry feelings towards another person. And ultimately, it extinguishes any light and all love from the hater’s heart.

It’s a serious thing, hate is. And America’s own tangled history of racial prejudice, fueled by unfamiliarity and ignorance, serves as a cultural memory of the power of hate.

So it was a shocking turn of events last week when the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a long-standing civil rights group, added more than a dozen new organizations to their list of hate-mongering groups. Neo-Nazis? KKK-spin-offs? Muslim or Jew-haters? No. The new “haters,” in this era of sexual license, are those who maintain that marriage has an intrinsic meaning--the union of man and woman--that simply cannot be extended to homosexual couplings. Crying “hate speech,” the SPLC denounced “anti-gay” groups for spreading “falsehoods” that say children do best when raised by a mom and a dad, as opposed to two dads or two moms. “Falsehoods” that support traditional marriage are now “hate speech,” thrown into the same filthy bucket as KKK and Neo-Nazi ideology.

Hagelin is attempting to sell folks a weak Hollandaise sauce and stale toast claim that these groups are supposedly being unfairly silenced or "victimized."

Nowhere in her piece did Hagelin address the real reason why SPLC considered these organizations as hate groups:

Even as some well-known anti-gay groups like Focus on the Family moderate their views, a hard core of smaller groups, most of them religiously motivated, have continued to pump out demonizing propaganda aimed at homosexuals and other sexual minorities. These groups’ influence reaches far beyond what their size would suggest, because the “facts” they disseminate about homosexuality are often amplified by certain politicians, other groups and even news organizations. Of the 18 groups profiled below, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) will be listing 13 next year as hate groups (eight were previously listed), reflecting further research into their views; those are each marked with an asterisk. Generally, the SPLC’s listings of these groups is based on their propagation of known falsehoods — claims about LGBT people that have been thoroughly discredited by scientific authorities — and repeated, groundless name-calling. Viewing homosexuality as unbiblical does not qualify organizations for listing as hate groups.

 Hagelin's omission is intentional and it reveals the game plan on the part of those condemning SPLC for standing up to these groups.

They are sidestepping the credible reasons why SPLC has a beef with these groups (i.e. the usage of junk science, the pushing of known lies to smear the lgbt community) in an attempt to make the controversy about a backlash regarding gay marriage.

Of course this notion is false and Hagelin as well as others who would defend these anti-gay hate groups on these grounds know this.

But I guess when you are in the business of lying about the lgbt community, being deceptive in general comes easy to you.