SPLC "Hate Map" Attacks Christian Legal Group

By Martin Fisher, CAN News Correspondent

The Southern Poverty Law Center has once again come under fire, along “Amazon Smile,” for its anti-Christian targeting, this time by a prominent Christian legal scholar whose organization he said was slandered.

Mike Farris of the Alliance Defending Freedom joins other Christian organization leaders who are calling out the SPLC as a far-left partisan group that uses slander against organizations they disagree with.

Of particular concern to Farris is the “Amazon Smiles” charity program that dropped the ADF from their list of beneficiaries. The program allows Amazon shoppers to share 0.5-percent of qualified purchases to listed organizations.

Amazon based its rejection of the Christian legal group on information obtained through the SPLC “hate map,” which claims to locate proven hate groups across America.

The ADF is not the first to be booted from the Amazon Smiles program based on the SPLC "hate map."

The SPLC is currently being sued by the D. James Kennedy Ministries, which suffered a similar fate after it was dropped from the “Amazon Smiles” program.

The "hate map" was also the cause of a violent act in 2012, when Floyd Corkins shot a security guard at the headquarters of the Family Research Council after finding their name on the SPLC "hate map." Corkins was sentenced to 25 years in prison.

In a May 3 letter obtained by Christian Action Network, Farris noted, “Although the SPLC did good work many years ago, it has devolved into a far-left propaganda machine that slanders organizations with which it disagrees and destroys the possibility of civil discourse in the process.”

“Once the SPLC identifies an ideological opponent, its goal is to ruin them,” Farris added.

Christian Action Network President Martin Mawyer agreed with Farris’ assessment, saying, “It absolutely is slander. It is a political attack strategy using a so-called 'hate map' that is disguised as a non-partisan, unbiased community service to locate dangerous hate groups.”

Mawyer added that with many organizations of outstanding Christian testimony on that list because of a bold stand for Biblical truth, there is a silver lining to the fact that CAN is also in the same SPLC cross-hairs as DJK Ministries, the FRC and the ADF.

“It is important to remember that they are intentionally distorting information in order to slander all of God’s people who are boldly standing for Biblical truth,” Mawyer added.

Farris quoted SPLC Senior Fellow Mark Potoki as saying, “Sometimes the press will describe us as monitoring hate crimes . . . I want to say plainly that our aim in life is to destroy these groups, to completely destroy them.”