On Monday, the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins asked supporters to contribute to FRC’s campaign against the Southern Poverty Law Center, an Alabama-based organization that monitors and challenges extremist groups and hateful rhetoric. We reported in September that the SPLC is the target of a coordinated attack by Religious Right organizations, who have been angered by the SPLC’s labeling of some anti-LGBTQ organizations as “hate groups.” Perkins’ new email says FRC is trying to raise $200,000 for the effort by March 15:
Exposing the SPLC’s radical agenda is one of the highest priorities we have here at FRC in 2018. Teachers, parents, and K-12 students can ill afford to substitute science and math with cross-dressing, gender-spectrum training, and same-sex dating skills.
Perkins accuses the SPLC of trying to “marginalize and ultimately silence the voice of Christians.” Readers who click through to the donation page are told, “The SPLC’s agenda to destroy as many Catholic, Baptist, and Pentecostal organizations as possible, and to push a pro-LGBT agenda in K-12 education, must be halted.”
Perkins also calls on President Donald Trump to “forcefully direct all federal agencies to eliminate the SPLC as a reliable and credible source for information and data.”
The FRC is joined by many other Religious Right groups in its attack on the SPLC. As we noted in December, the first act of Matt Barber’s new Christian Civil Rights Watch organization was to petition President Trump to “publicly denounce” the SPLC.
