Friday, December 10, 2010

Southern Poverty Law Center, Family Research Council and the Rhetoric of Hate

Recently the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization with its roots in the civil rights struggles of the African American community published a list of organizations it identified as hate groups. These groups were actually added to an already existing list compiled by the SPLC which was made up of white supremacist organizations like the KKK. Included was the organization the Family Research Council, which has since fired back at the SPLC by saying they are simply representing Christian values and a perspective shared by the majority of Americans. This is in fact patently false.

It is important to recognize the nature of the FRC and its activities. They are known among many mainstream groups as a far-right advocacy organization that specializes in two issues, gay rights and abortion. Not only is the information they put out not widely considered legitimate research, but they are known to in fact be heavily committed and involved in political campaigns. Most recently they partnered with the National Organization for Marriage, who themselves are widely recognized for their far-right political views, in committing a virulent and riotously bigoted campaign to vote out of office the three justices of the Iowa Supreme Court who were up for election this past November. Those justices included the chief justice and were part of a unanimous decision by the nine judge panel that LGBT citizens in Iowa were constitutionally endowed with the right to marriage. They have since been very public about their intentions to continue their crusade in the next election cycle until all of the justices who participated in that decision are removed from office. I say committed a campaign because the campaign against these three justices was not only fraught with the use of the most virulent and bigoted rhetoric against members of the LGBT community, but it also included outright harassment of those justices by members of their organizations, which were summarily recorded on video and circulated on the internet.

While the rhetoric of the FRC is presented as 'research' which has been somehow independently vetted and verified, it is nothing but that, rhetoric. This far-right organization does their best to present a public face of reasonableness and rationality in the media, however it only takes a cursory investigation to see the depth of bigotry ingrained in their message. All of this is while representing themselves as tolerant Christians who are not anti-gay, but merely seeking to protect the welfare of children and society through the institution of marriage.

The research and statements of this organization are actually categorically false and the list of organizations or news outlets who present them as even remotely possible is short and telling. Recently FOX News interviewed Tony Perkins, the president of the organization, in response to the SPLC's labeling of them as a hate group and he firmly declares that organization as a far-left fringe group desperately trying to hold on to being relevant when their leftist platform of promoting a homosexual agenda is losing soundly, as represented in the last election, he alleges. Not only is this not true, but it presenting a lie as fact to a large portion of the public who watch FOX News and consider it a legitimate news organization.

The Facts:

According to a 2009 USA Today/Gallup poll, while the majority of Americans are opposed to gay marriage, those numbers swing dramatically when you consider how they break down, with 60% of people under the age of 30 thinking gay marriages should be legally recognized and have the same rights and status as heterosexual marriage. The majority of self-identified liberals and moderates support gay marriage, with only self-identified conservatives representing an overwhelming majority against gay marriage.

While the country remains split pretty evenly on the issue of gay-marriage, recent polls show that the majority of Americans do believe that there should be some sort of legal recognition for same-sex couples, including legal rights and protections similar or equal to those of heterosexuals. It is interesting, however, to note that while those polls are pretty evenly split in general, Republicans and self-identified conservatives still strongly oppose gay marriage.

The country, though, isn't evenly split over the issues of LGBT people serving openly in the military. That same page on PollingReport.com shows that the majority, ranging from two-thirds to three-fourths, of Americans believe gay people should be able to serve openly and would vote for open service if it was on a ballot.

So, when the FRC represents themselves as being in step with even a large number of Americans, they are either lying, or they are really referring only to self-identified conservatives. Even among those conservatives, or among Republicans, polled there isn't a unanimous consensus. This is the same fallacy touted by pundits like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and even Bill O'Rielly. These people state as fact that the 'liberals', or according to O'Reilly the 'leftist pinheads', are losing this imaginary culture war they have concocted over the years. To them it is just an easily recognizable truth that their political ideology is the majority opinion, which means that they have the right to impose it on all of us by encoding it into law, and that somehow because they believe they are a part of the majority that that somehow makes them right and that the reasoning behind those opinions are factual and moral truth.

Here is the truth: In another ten to twenty years same-sex marriage will be a reality in this country. In fact if the court case against Prop 8 continues on to the US Supreme Court and is successful there, which is the inevitable ruling if it is ruled on its merits, then gay marriage will be a reality in this country far sooner. As far as I know, the striking down of a state constitutional amendment, which Prop 8 was, by the SCOTUS would then overturn all of the laws, statutes, and constitutional amendments set in to law across this country. While this may create an outcry among people for a host of reasons and would, of course, be labeled as legislating from the bench or judicial advocacy by the right-wing, and then likely thought of as that by much of the rest of the country, within a short period of time it would become a non-issue, as it has in MA. In that state, despite all of the anti-gay energy poured in, the constitutional amendment did not make it through the legislative process in time to stop marriage licenses from being issued and then has subsequently, since 2004, not been a serious ballot issue. Once the majority of Americans see how much of a non-issue gay marriage will be in their daily lives, how it will in fact not significantly impact their freedom of religion or the operations of their churches, and how it won't lead to the indoctrination of their children by public schools, all of the uproar will go away and any continued opposition will be relegated to the far-right fringe, as has opposition to legalized abortion.

In conclusion, there is a reason that the Southern Poverty Law Center labeled the Family Research Council, among other anti-gay organizations, as a hate-group. Despite the exterior it likes to present of a moderate Christian organization devoted to researching issues related to families and its positions and research suggesting that civil rights for gay people somehow negatively impacts society, it is actually a far-right organization who are motivated by continuing to impose their religious doctrine on our political process. One need not look past the rhetoric used in their campaigns, in their literature, and its political affiliations to see that. They raise money for the purpose of affecting public policy through political campaigns and do so with rhetoric that the majority of Americans, as evidenced by legitimate polling data, disagree with, and I would assert would be disgusted by. For any news organization to represent them as anything but a conservative, if not arch-conservative far-right, political organization is both a lie and an injustice to the majority of Americans. An organization that presents them as a reasonable and rational contributor to our political process and its discourse truly identifies that organization, or news channel, as part of or pandering to that far-right fringe.