“Do not gloat when your enemy falls,” advises Proverbs. “When they stumble, do not let your heart rejoice.” But conservative Christians couldn’t help gloating over layoffs and program cuts at the Southern Poverty Law Center, the $117 million nonprofit that has labeled some Christian groups as “hate groups.”
“The SPLC has overplayed its hand,” wrote the Alliance Defending Freedom’s Jeremy Tedesco in a Fox News editorial, claiming SPLC’s “exaggeration and outright lies” are part of “a blatant attempt” to push groups like ADF “to the margins of American life.”
Robert Knight called the SPLC “the biggest bully in the room” for its famous hate map tracking 1,430 radical and anti-government groups. Knight has worked with the Family Research Council, Concerned Women for America, and D. James Kennedy Ministries, groups that along with ADF have been labeled as hate groups by SPLC.
In June, SPLC laid off 60 employees — about one-fourth of its staff — and shuttered some of its programs, according to an announcement by union employees.
“Right-Wingers Rejoice Over Layoffs at Southern Poverty Law Center,” reported the Huffington Post as conservative groups and leaders piled on.
“About time!” said Mike Huckabee, an ordained Southern Baptist minister and former Arkansas governor who now serves as honorary national chairman for the evangelical political group My Faith Votes. “They are a hate group that labels others a ‘hate group.’”
“America will be better off when (SPLC is) forced to lay off every single employee,” said The Federalist.
Penny Nance, CEO and president of Concerned Women for America, said the SPLC is “incapable of keeping track of all the Americans who believe in God, faith, family and in our constitutional principles. We are still the majority in the country, no matter how hard SPLC tries to slander and shame us.”
The Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal attacked SPLC’s 2023 hate report, saying the report “reads like a dispatch from a ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ dystopia, where evil white Christian jackbooted thugs have seized control of the government and are forcing everyone to adopt their propaganda. … The SPLC covers for the woke movement, which has already seized the commanding heights of American culture and is straining to silence dissent.”
The SPLC said in a press statement it is “undergoing an organizational restructuring” that resulted in staff reductions.
According to the Associated Press: “The layoffs follow several years of turmoil at the organization, including the dismissal of its founder in 2019, a leadership change and the bringing in of an outside group to review workplace practices.”
The SPLC Union offered a harsh response: “Today, the Southern Poverty Law Center — an organization with nearly a billion dollars in reserves, given an F rating by CharityWatch for ‘hoarding’ donations — gutted its staff by a quarter.”
According to its 2022 IRS Form 990, the SPLC in 2022 took in $109 million in contributions and grants and had total revenue of $140 million against expenses of $111 million. The group reported total assets of $723 million in 2022, the vast majority of which ($660 million) were listed as investments.
Margaret Huang
Margaret Huang serves as president and chief executive officer of the SPLC and its lobbying arm, the SPLC Action Fund.
Founded in Montgomery, Ala., in 1971, SPLC began as a civil rights law firm that quickly won major judgments against the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups. It still fights those groups as well as militias and groups promoting antisemitism.
Over the decades, SPLC’s pursuit of justice has brought it into conflict with self-proclaimed Christian groups, including:
- Faith-based racist groups, such as the Christian Identity movement, which promotes antisemitic and racist theology
- Anti-Muslim groups including Global Faith Institute, Fortress of Faith, Global and Theological Trends, and Truth in Love Project
- Eight “Radical Traditional Catholic” groups, including Christ or Chaos, The Remnant, The Fatima Crusader, and Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary
In 2003, SPLC won a church-state separation case, forcing Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the state’s Supreme Court building. Many conservative evangelical groups supported Moore.
Much of the criticism of SPLC and its hate map comes from dozens of Christian groups that battle LGBTQ rights, including American Family Association, Concerned Women for America, and groups founded by James Dobson of Focus on the Family, including the Alliance Defending Freedom and Family Research Council.
Conservative groups attack the SPLC saying it “has long demonized mainstream conservative and Christian nonprofits”; is “demonizing the Judeo-Christian tradition” and shows “animus toward peaceful, religious Americans.”
Here’s how SPLC describes the 86 “anti-LGBTQ” groups it tracks: “A central theme of anti-LGBTQ organizing and ideology is the opposition to LGBTQ rights or support of homophobia, heterosexism and/or cisnormativity often expressed through demonizing rhetoric and grounded in harmful pseudoscience that portrays LGBTQ people as threats to children, society and often public health.”
For its 2023 hate map, SPLC added a number of anti-LGBTQ groups that are members of Focus on the Family’s network of 40 state partners: the California Policy Council, the Center for Christian Virtue in Ohio, the Florida Family Policy Council, Frontline Policy Council in Georgia, the Louisiana Family Forum, Massachusetts Family Institute, the Montana Family Foundation, the Pennsylvania Family Institute, and the Family Foundation of Virginia.
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