"Does it not concern you that within the past five years, the SPLC has been linked to gunmen who carried out two terrorist shootings in the DC area?" asks letter

Contact: J.P. Duffy or Alice Chao, 866-FRC-NEWS, 866-372-6397

WASHINGTON, June 22, 2017 /Christian Newswire/ -- Family Research Council, along with a coalition of forty-one conservative leaders and organizations, released a letter sent to GuideStar USA "to express our strong disagreement with GuideStar's newly implemented policy that labels 46 American organizations as 'hate groups.'" GuideStar bills itself as a neutral organization that seeks to "gather and disseminate information about every single IRS-registered nonprofit organization."

Recently, GuideStar began using the Southern Poverty Law Center's defamatory "hate group" label on profiles of 46 non-profit organizations, including FRC's GuideStar page.

The letter reads, in part:

"The SPLC has no bona fides to make such determinations. It is not a governmental organization using a rigorous criteria to create its lists, and it is not a scientifically oriented organization. The SPLC is merely another 'progressive' political organization.

"The 'hate group' list is nothing more than a political weapon targeting people it deems to be its political enemies. The list is ad hoc, partisan, and agenda-driven. The SPLC doesn't even pretend to identify groups on the political left that engage in 'hate.' Mosques or Islamist groups that promote radical speech inciting anti-Semitism and actual violence are not listed by the SPLC even though many have been publicly identified after terrorist attacks. Radical, violent leftist environmentalists or speech suppressing thugs -- like the rioting "antifa" movement -- receive no mention from the SPLC.

"Can it be of any surprise then that SPLC's hate map was used by a political activist and domestic terrorist to perpetrate the very sort of hate crimes SPLC claims to oppose? In 2012, a shooter entered the Family Research Council headquarters in Washington, D.C., to 'kill as many as possible' because SPLC had identified FRC as a 'hate group,' and the killer-to-be relied on SPLC's website to identify targets, according to his sworn testimony. The SPLC continues to list on its website people such as House Majority Whip Steve Scalise who was recently shot by James T. Hodgkinson who 'liked' SPLC's Facebook page. Does it not concern you that within the past five years, the SPLC has been linked to gunmen who carried out two terrorist shootings in the DC area?

"…We think it is a reasonable point that an aggressive political partisan like the SPLC should not be allowed to be the judge and jury of its opponents' character and motivations. The fact that the SPLC only targets groups on the political right supports this contention. As Karl Zinsmeister notes, while it is entirely acceptable to disagree vigorously with one's political opponents, it is 'utterly unfair to insist they are hate criminals.' He reproduces a statement made by SPLC's Mark Potok: 'Sometimes the press will describe us as monitoring hate crimes and so on…. I want to say plainly that our aim in life is to destroy these groups, to completely destroy them.'"

To read the full letter, please see: downloads.frc.org/EF/EF17F36.pdf