During a recent appearance on Gordon Klingenschmitt’s “Pray In Jesus Name” program, right-wing activist Matt Barber said that People For the American Way, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans United for Separation of Church and State and other organizations were partially responsible for the church shooting in Texas last weekend that left more than 20 people dead.
“We need to look at the bigger picture here,” Barber said. “This thing didn’t happen in a vacuum. We need to understand that it is this anti-Christian climate here in the United States … This was a man who hated Jesus, he hated Christians and he literally was engaged in an act of war against Christians.”
“What spurred him on? What caused him to do this?” Barber asked, linking the Texas massacre to the shooting at the Family Research Council in 2012, which right-wing activists routinely blame on the SPLC. “I’m not going to say this is all in the lap of the Southern Poverty Law Center, but Antifa, Black Lives Matter, the SPLC, groups like People For the American Way, Americans United Against Separation of Church and State [sic], the ACLU—don’t forget, Roger Baldwin famously said, ‘Communism is the goal’—communism is atheism, atheism is communism, it’s leftism, they hate Christians, they hate Christianity. So we are seeing a climate of anti-Christian hate and bigotry that I think was the foundation, perhaps even the justification, that this monster used in his own mind to rationalize taking out these precious souls and followers of Christ Jesus.”
