RALEIGH — The Southern Poverty Law Center added parental rights groups to its “hate map” of extremist groups in 2022, according to a report by The Daily Signal.
According to the report, parents’ rights groups like Moms for Liberty are now included in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) hate map, which has increasingly been found to tag mainly organizations that SPLC deems to be “right-wing” or ideologically different from its own left of center leanings.
The opening paragraphs of SPLC’s report “The Year in Hate and Extremism 2022” describes anti-LGBT rhetoric and violence by right-wing entities or individuals but ignore incidents by the left, such as antifa, Black Lives Matter or LGBT individuals who have engaged in violent acts. An example of LGBT violence is the mass shooting at a Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee, where a transgender male killed three children and three adults.
The report’s recommendations appear to want more government tracking of groups and individuals named on the hate map as well as those who fund them. Without outright calling for it, SPLC’s recommendations are a matrix of requests to social media, employers and elected officials to use their positions to either censor or “cancel” any given group.
SPLC’s report describes “locally driven right-wing mobilization” and an “assault on inclusive education.”
In the report, SPLC portrays activism by Moms for Liberty as anti-LGBT and as being an “anti-student inclusion group” as well as having “extremist ties.” Yet the more than 250 chapters of Moms for Liberty formed organically — and quickly —during the year following the pandemic. The rise in parental activism seen nationwide appears to have been a reaction to what parents saw their children being taught during pandemic remote instruction, but also in pushing to get schools reopened for in-person instruction and fighting to remove mask mandates from children.
Once these parents got involved, they stayed active by exposing what they believed to be public schools’ political and ideological indoctrination, sexually explicit and pornographic books in school libraries, engaging elected officials, as well as the training of teachers in the controversial Critical Race Theory with the express purpose of weaving the core components of Critical Race Theory into classroom lessons and interactions.
North State Journal reached out to various chapters of Moms for Liberty in North Carolina and received a statement from the co-founders of the original group, Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich.
“Two-thirds of Americans think the public education system is on the wrong track today. That is why our organization is devoted to empowering parents to be a part of their child’s public school education,” Justice and Descovich said. “That is our fundamental goal, which began just two years ago when teacher’s unions locked students out of schools during the pandemic.
“Empowering parents continues to be our mission today and that has fueled our organization’s growth – like wildfire to now 45 states in the country. Name-calling parents who want to be a part of their child’s education as ‘hate groups’ or ‘bigoted’ just further exposes what this battle is all about: Who fundamentally gets to decide what is taught to our kids in school — parents or government employees? We believe that parental rights do not stop at the classroom door and no amount of hate from groups like this is going to stop that.”
The SPLC’s report then highlights groups and praises other groups that are countering parental rights groups, such as “Support Our Schools.”
SPLC also does not mention the activist work of its own “education” offshoot previously called “Teaching Tolerance” that was renamed “Learning for Justice” in 2021.
Learning for Justice promotes diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) themes, gender and LGBT ideologies, as well as “free” lessons and materials for teachers on racial and social justice in the classroom, many of which contain Critical Race Theory components.
Over the years, the SPLC has also failed to acknowledge that its “hate map” could, and has, inspired violent acts, such as the mass shooting attempt at the D.C. office of the Family Research Council (FRC) by Floyd Lee Corkins in August 2012.
A little over a year after that incident, Corkins was sentenced to 25 years in prison for shooting a security guard who managed to head Corkins off as well as three charges of committing an act of terrorism.
After his arrest, Corkins had told the FBI that he had used the SPLC’s hate map to identify the Family Research Council as a target, according to a video of an interrogation of Corkins obtained by FRC. Corkins told the investigators, “It was … uh, Southern Poverty Law, lists, uh, anti-gay groups.”
SPLC has also been criticized for maintaining $162 million in offshore accounts as of 2020, according to a report by the Washington Free Beacon. The discovery of the funds followed accusations of racial discrimination and sexual harassment against SPLC’s founder Morris Dees which ultimately lead to Dees being fired. In addition to the firing of Dees, Richard Cohen, the group’s CEO since 1986, also resigned after allegations of racism towards SPLC’s minority staffers.
