Southern Poverty Law Center Pushes Twisted Definition of 'Hate'

Human Events, Dec 11, 2006 by Vadum, Matthew

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has one key message: The nation is boiling over with hatred and intolerance. Decades after the civil rights movement forever changed America and despite the enactment of the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and the imposition of affirmative action, American race relations are always worse today than in the days of Jim Crow, according to SPLC. "Hate in America is a dreadful, daily constant. The dragging death of a black man in Jasper, Tex.; the crucifixion of a gay man in Laramie, Wyo.; and post-9/11 hate crimes against hundreds of Arab-Americans. Muslim Americans and Sikhs are not 'isolated incidents.1 They are eruptions of a nation's intolerance." That's the message posted at Tolerance.org, a center website for its special project, 'Ten Ways to Fight Hate: A Community Response Guide."

"Somewhere in America ... EVERY HOUR someone commits a hate crime. EVERY DAY at least eight blacks, four gays or lesbians, two Jews, two whites and one Latino become hate crimes victims. EVERY WEEK a cross is burned," according to the guide [emphasis in originall. If the center's math is correct, 8,760 "hate crimes" are committed in the U.S. every year and 52 crosses are burned. But that's not exactly a tidal wave of bigotry in an ethnically diverse nation of 300 million people.

The SPLC understands the importance of language. It fights what it labels "hate," "intolerance" and "discrimination," but it defines those terms very differently than most Americans would. To the center, you practice "hate" whenever you fail to genuflect with politically correct reverence before every human difference.

In the SPLC's world, armies of the night are forever on the march. Cross-burnings, lynchings and rampant racial discrimination are omnipresent. Those who question the SPLC's approach to race are blacklisted as contemptible bigots.

The center lumps all sorts of groups on America's political right together, labeling them enemies of the Republic. Conservative, libertarian, anti-tax, immigration reductionist and other groups are all viewed as legitimate targets for vilification.

Big Money

SPLC has an enormous endowment of more than $152 million, according to its 2005 annual report. Its 1RS Form 990 for the fiscal year ended Oct. 31, 2005, shows that the center took in gross receipts of $49.8 million that year, $29.7 million of which consisted of contributions and grants.

According to its balance sheet, by Oct. 31, 2005, its total assets had ballooned from $173.2 million at the beginning of the fiscal year, to $189.4 million by year's end. SPLC's endowment is so large that it reported endowment income of nearly $3.5 million, including interest income of $728,356.

Although SPLC bills itself as a civil rights law firm, it devotes only a fraction of its resources to actual legal work. Of the $28.9 million in expenses it declared for the year ended Oct. 31, 2005, only $4.5 million went to "providing legal services for victims of civil rights injustice and hale crimes," and $837,907 for "specific assistance to individuals" in the form of "litigation services," according to its Form 990. Roughly half of its expenditures, $14.7 million, were devoted to "educating the general public, public officials, teachers, students and law enforcement agencies and officers with respect to issues of hate and intolerance and promoling tolerance of differences through the schools."

In the same period, SPLC paid attorney Morris Dees $297,559 in salary and pension-plan contributions. On the list of nonprofit "employees who earned more than their organization's chief executive," (part of the Chronicle of Philanthropy's annual survey of top nonprofit executive salaries, published September 28), Dees ranked 48th in the nation. SPLC President Richard Cohen took home $274.838. but center co-founder Joseph L. Levin received only $171,904 for his efforts as general counsel.

Bond's Smear Tactics

SPLC is based in Montgomery, Ala., site of the famous bus boycott that gave birth to the civil rights movement and made a national icon of Rosa Parks, the woman who courageously refused to move to the back of the bus. The center's fortress-sty Ie headquarters seems intended to shield employees from the hordes of neo-Nazis, skinheads and militia groups the center wants people to believe wish to do it harm.

The co-founders of SPLC were Julian Bond and Morris Dees. Bond is the founding president. Since 1998, he has been chairman of the NAACP but remains active with the center and currently serves on its board of directors. A highly visible public figure, he is well acquainted with its smear tactics, having compared conservatives and the Bush Administration to Afghanistan's ousted Taliban regime.

Bond has smeared black conservatives with relish, deriding them for joining what he calls "a right-wing conspiracy" aimed at eliminating affirmative action, abridging voting rights and reforming public education. In 2002, he told an NAACP convention that black conservatives were participants in "an interlocking network of funders, groups and activists.... They are the money, the motivation and the movement behind vouchers, the legal assault on affirmative action and other remedies for discrimination, attempts to rcapportion us out of office and attacks on equity everywhere." These conservatives are "black hustlers and hucksters ... (who). like ventriloquists' dummies, speak in their puppet master's voice," he said. Bond called antiracial quota campaigner Ward Connerly a "fraud" and a "con man."