Civics quiz time: what do the Family Research Council, the American College of Pediatricians, FAIR (the Federation for American Immigration Reform) and Alliance Defending Freedom all have in common?
The answer is that each of the above organizations has been branded as a ‘hate group’ by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a far left and anti-Christian website whose sole purpose apparently is to attack pro-family groups which espouse traditional American values. (SPLC regularly issues news releases which are factually flimsy but heavy on innuendo and smears, attacking and distorting the work of folks like the American Family Association and even the Center for Security Policy founded by respected former Reagan administration official Frank Gaffney.)
The latest group to be targeted by SPLC is FOCUS ON THE FAMILY, the Colorado Springs based ministry which I consider to be the gold standard of pro-family Christian organizations in our nation. Founded 48 years ago by Evangelist and psychologist Dr. James Dobson, FOCUS has been led for the past two decades by President Jim Daly.
During those 20 years, there has been no hint of scandal at FOCUS ON THE FAMILY (unlike the smear merchants at the Southern Poverty Law Center: in April 2019, SPLC founder Morris Dees was fired for unspecified “misconduct.”
The Washington Post suggested back then that Dees had made racist and sexist comments over time, although SPLC sanitized the real reasons with a wimpy statement saying Dees had acted in ways that did not reflect “the mission of the organization.”)
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These days, that mission has been reduced to promoting LGBTQ causes, posting online directions on how to oppose U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson’s reconciliation bill in Congress and “dismantling White Supremacy and Christian Nationalism.” But let’s be honest: it’s real work as a non-profit is to generate donations to keep their doors open…while simultaneously attacking decent, God-fearing ministries like FOCUS ON THE FAMILY by baselessly branding them as ‘hate groups.’ That may generate online clicks and feature stories which reach the literally dozens of viewers on MSNBC, but everyone else pretty much treats their hysterical ‘hate group’ updates as a lame joke.
FOCUS ON THE FAMILY, however, is not laughing and is not taking the slander lying down. President Jim Daly issued a statement declaring SPLC’s “inflammatory rhetoric has incited violence against innocent believers and fanned the very behavior they claim to want to prevent.” Daly added that “it would appear the SPLC, which has championed its faux hate list for years, always finds a way to hate Christians.”
In an interview with the Salem Radio Network, Gary Schneeberger—assistant to Jim Daly for media relations—professed confusion as to why FOCUS has suddenly been given the SPLC’s hate group designation. “We’ve been sort of hate-adjacent on their list for years…they said some things about us that weren’t positive but until now we’ve never made the list. Some people in our organization started laughing when they heard this. We’ve been on the same mission for nearly 50 years and they’re just now seeing who we are?”
Schneeberger has carefully reviewed all 13 (!) pages SPLC posted online as to why they consider FOCUS ON THE FAMILY a hate group and says the key phrase is when they castigate—in SPLC’s words—the ministry for having long relied on what it calls its ‘Biblical worldview strategy’ to push back on LGBTQ progress and reproductive rights.
“First of all, it isn’t a Biblical worldview strategy. It is a Biblical worldview, period,” Schneeberger says. “And it is not hateful to push back on anything in the area of public policy…especially when some group challenges Biblical truth and holy conviction.” Rather than dream up word salads, they should simply acknowledge that FOCUS ON THE FAMILY believes in the Bible and they don’t, so that’s why they have a problem.
Jim Daly’s leadership has been marked by reinvigorating the organization’s marriage and family content and outreach. That manifested itself in the most recent national survey of ministry participants: it revealed that over the past 12 months, 170,000 couples with marriages in crisis say FOCUS helped them make significant progress toward saving their marriages. And 530,000 moms and dads credit the ministry with helping them build stronger families. That’s what is really going on under the supervision of Jim Daly.
Of course, that runs counter to the driving philosophy of the Southern Poverty Law Center which is obsessed with promoting LGBTQ issues while carelessly lumping supporters of Christianity and traditional values under the totally fraudulent and insulting umbrella of so-called hate.
That’s why so many of us love pastors like Dr. Jack Graham of Prestonwood Baptist Church in Dallas, Pastor Allen Jackson of World Outreach Church, and Jack Hibbs of Calvary Chapel in Chino Hills, California. They—as I do—believe that enough is enough in our culture, and it is time for God’s people to come out of the closet. As Gary Schneeberger observes so pointedly, “Hate is far too big a word to be thrown around with such little discretion. That’s what they do at SPLC…and that’s what too many people in this country do.”
Standing up to online bullies like the Southern Poverty Law Center is not only wise, but essential to combat any possibility that casual news consumers, the linear equivalent of low information voters at election time—might hear or read that wonderful organizations like FOCUS ON THE FAMILY are somehow purveyors of hate. They are the antithesis of hate and are devoted to loving what God loves and helping people grow and preserve healthy families. The SPLC should be ashamed of itself for claiming something so baseless.
As President Donald J. Trump famously declared after a 2024 assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, it is time to “Fight, Fight, Fight.”
And as for the Southern Poverty Law Center, most intelligent Americans consider them to be like a dead mouse in your kitchen mousetrap. Everyone knows where they are…it just becomes a question of who will go in there, pick them up, and flush them down the toilet.
Tom Tradup is VP/News & Talk Programming for Dallas-based Salem Radio Network. He can be reached at ttradup@srnradio.com