An anonymously written Aug. 25 CNSNews.com “news” article highlights how “Roman Catholic Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia criticized the Southern Poverty Law Center for falsely labeling the Alliance Defending Freedom as a ‘hate group,'” specifically defending anti-gay group Alliance Defending Freedom.
In addition to the usual boilerplate defense of ADF, the anonynous CNS writer surprisingly goes beyond previous ConWeb attacks on the SPLC — though it presents ADF’s description of itself as fact instead of opinion — and actually cites the SPLC document that makes the group’s case against ADF:
The Alliance Defending Freedom is a non-profit legal organization dedicated to “advocating for religious liberty, the sanctity of life, and marriage and family.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center has labelled the ADF an “anti-LBGT [sic] hate group.”
On its website, the SPLC has posted a timeline of things the ADF has said and done over the years that the SPLC believes has earned it the label “hate group.”
The timeline starts in 2000 with this item: “The ADF helps fund and strategize the filing of a key amicus (friend of the court) briefs on behalf of the Boy Scouts of America in Dale v. Boy Scouts of America, in which a gay assistant Scoutmaster sued the BSA for expelling him because of its ban on gay members and leaders.”
The SPLC’s timeline goes on to state that in 2014: “ADF sends a letter to school districts around the country stating that no school is legally beholden to implement trans-inclusive policies and allow trans students to access bathrooms and locker rooms of the gender with which they identify. The letter denies the gender identity of such students and claims that such inclusive policies are allowing opposite sex students to access the facilities, which is ‘dangerous.’ ‘It is simply unfathomable that a school district would cave to activist demands that students have access to restroom and locker room facilities dedicated to the opposite sex.’”
Of course, CNS is cherry-picking the more benign examples from SPLC’s timeline. No mention of, say, the assertion by former ADF leader Alan Sears that the campaign for gay rights is “a war of propaganda, just as Hitler did so masterfully in Nazi Germany,” its pushing of the discredited link between homosexuality and pedophilia, or Sears’ saying of gays that “there is no room for compromise with those who would call evil ‘good.'”
The anonymous CNS writer went on to cite “a blog posted on the ADF website” that “hit back at the SPLC,” but did not mention that the blog post does not refute any of the evidence the SPLC cites against it.