"Hate Groups"

Dana Milbank wrote a column at WaPo that has to be seen to be believed. (Well, if you're one of the Villagers, I suppose it makes perfect sense.) It's nothing more than a white-wash of FRC and a call for everyone to "be nice" and stop labeling hate groups as hate groups. It starts off badly and goes downhill from there:

Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest gay rights organization, posted an alert on its blog Tuesday: “Paul Ryan Speaking at Hate Group’s Annual Conference.”

The “hate group” that the Republicans’ vice presidential candidate would be addressing? The Family Research Council, a mainstream conservative think tank founded by James Dobson and run for many years by Gary Bauer.

FRC is not mainstream. It is an extremist political organization using the Bible as a weapon.

Other bloggers, when commenting on this post, always start off by claiming that they respect Milbank. I have to confess I don't read him regularly, and if this is an example of his commentary, I don't really see any need to. He quite obviously has not done any research on FRC, he quite obviously has not read the SPLC's statement in which it details the reasons for declaring FRC a hate group -- or any of the numerous statements issued thereafter -- nor, apparently, has be bothered to inform himself what the issue really is. It's just another out-of-touch Beltway condemnation of anything that might be construed as "the left." Oh, and both sides do it.

Human Rights Campaign isn’t responsible for the shooting. Neither should the organization that deemed the FRC a “hate group,” the Southern Poverty Law Center, be blamed for a madman’s act. But both are reckless in labeling as a “hate group” a policy shop that advocates for a full range of conservative Christian positions, on issues from stem cells to euthanasia.

"Policy shop"? You've got to be kidding me.

Here's the cherry on top:

Those who support gay rights will gain nothing by sticking inflammatory labels on their opponents, many of whom are driven by deeply held religious beliefs.

Yes, and sincerely held religious beliefs gave us the Inquisition, the Crusades, the Thirty Years' War, the drive to exterminate American Indians, slavery, genocide, and gods know what other glories of Western civilization. And ultimately, so what? Believe what you like, and base the law on reason.

(I actually spent a couple of hours last evening scrolling through the comments and leaving a couple of my own. As one commenter pointed out, there is a group of repeaters, obviously hard-core right-wingers who are impervious to logic and fact, and there there are a number of unique commenters who actually do document their statements with links and quotes. Most of those are strongly against Milbank's column, probably because they know what they're talking about.)

Pam Spaulding wrote a good, solid analysis of the column on Friday.

My assumption is that Mr. Milbank doesn’t read or see any news reports of the continuing struggle in much of the U.S. for LGBTs to have even the most basic of civil rights he takes for granted — equal accommodation, the right not be fired for sexual orientation or gender identity — oh, and not to be killed or maimed for simply existing. His overall message is the inaccurate, pathetic, lazy zero-sum argument that, in his mind, the LGBT community has not suffered as much violence or deprivation of civil rights as, say, blacks. Please. Like I said, he doesn’t bother to even bone up on recent incidents of horrid violence[.]

Apparently, Milbank feels that it isn't legitimate to label FRC a hate group until they start burning gay men on their front lawns.

John Aravosis also did a piece on the column -- or at least, sparked by the column -- that lays it all out, beginning with the header: "Why the Family Research Council is a hate group."

Because they lie.

And they know they lie.

And they don't care.

And they've been doing it for twenty years.

And when I say "lie," I dont' mean the standard Washington, DC version of a "lie," which is basically calling a lie anything you disagree with (aka, your facts hurt me so I'm simply going to call you a liar). I mean, an organization that decided early on that "the gay menace" was such a threat to American life that if it had to deceive the American people in order to convince them that gays were the anti-Christ, then so be it.

And for any journalist, like the Washington Post's Dana Milbank, who claims otherwise, suggesting that the Family Research Council is simply a "mainstream conservative" group, I'd ask them to do some original research on the anti-gay literature that the Family Research Council publishes, and the anti-gay pseudo-science that FRC "cites" on TV, before weighing in on a topic about which they know very little.

Aravosis'post is exhaustive and worth reading. There's also a good discussion in the comments.

For reference, here's the page on FRC from SPLC's Intelligence Files. (Note to Dana Milbank: it wasn't that hard to find. All you have to do is google "Southern Poverty Law Center" to get to the site, and go on from there. It's pretty user-friendly.)

One final thought on this: it was Peter LaBarbera who brought up the idea that the shooting was staged. I don't really believe it, but given the methods and tactics of the FRC, and that fact that as they lose ground they get more extreme, it starts to sound credible.