On August 15, 2012, a gunman walked into the Washington, DC headquarters of the Family Research Council with the intent of killing as many people as possible. Fortunately, the FRC’s building manager confronted him and, despite being shot in the arm, subdued him and prevented any loss of life.
When the gunman, Floyd Lee Corkins, was interrogated by the FBI about why he carried out this attack on the FRC, he said it was because of the organization’s anti-gay activism. When Corkins admitted that he had visited the website of the Southern Poverty Law Center while doing research, the Religious Right seized on the info as supposed proof that the SPLC’s designation of FRC as an anti-gay hate group was leading to violence.
In particular, they insisted that the “hate map” on the SPLC’s website played a direct role in Corkins’ actions.
How that vague image somehow directed Corkins to the FRC’s headquarters is never explained. In fact, the map doesn’t even provide any data as to FRC’s actual location, unlike the FRC’s own website which provides its address and detailed directions.
But since Corkins mentioned the research produced by the SPLC during his interrogation, and since Corkins was charged under the District of Columbia’s Anti-Terrorism Act of 2002, for activsts like Jerry Boykin and David Barton, that means that the SPLC is now “directly linked to domestic terrorism”:
Boykin: Islamic terrorists are not the only people we need to be concerned about. We have now, right here, in our own country, an organization that is connected to domestic terrorism as a result of a federal trial in Washington, DC.
..
Barton: The fact that now, in federal court, they have been directly linked to domestic terrorism, that’s significant stuff.
Much like the way that anti-Islam activists falsely insist that various Muslim groups were designated as “unindicted co-conspirators” with ties to terrorism by a federal court, we expect to keep hearing the Religious Right falsely assert that the SPLC is linked to domestic terrorism despite the fact that it is obviously nonsense.
