Playing the SPLC Hate Card – Gay Activist Joe Jervis on Pro-Family Support for Dolce & Gabbana

Not a Hater: Austin Ruse of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-FAM). Ruse’s group has been slandered by the leftist SPLC as a “hate group.”

By Peter LaBarbera

The pro-LGBT Left’s “hate” game is a cynical exercise in demonization and manipulation: by smearing people and organizations that oppose homosexual “marriage” or “gay” activism as “haters,” they seek to establish a narrative that delegitimizes any opposition to homosexualism as the moral equivalent of racism. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has turned this spurious tactic into a money-making machine–see the current issue of WND’s Whistleblower magazine, “The Hate Racket.”

Finally people of faith are fighting back: American Family Association has created an “[Anti-Christian] Bigotry Map” in response to the heavy-handed SPLC’s farcical “Hate Map,” on which AFTAH and more than a dozen other pro-family organizations are listed.

Below is an example of how homosexual activists like Joe Jervis, creater of the Joe.My.God blog, play the SPLC hate card against pro-family advocates. Note Jervis’ headline:

“Haters Are Thrilled that Italian Designers Dolce & Gabbana Oppose LGBT Rights”:

The alleged “hater” to which Jervis refers is not hateful at all. Austin Ruse is a Breitbart writer, a dedicated Catholic family man and the president of Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, which fights for pro-life and pro-family values at the United Nations. Ruse is a smart and capable guy–but his organization, like AFTAH, has been slandered by the SPLC as a “hate group” [see the map’s New York listings; AFTAH is found in the map’s Illinois listings].

In this case, Ruse was merely highlighting the remarks of (openly homosexual) fashion designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, who recently reiterated their opposition to homosexual “marriage” and “gay parenting.” As Ruse writes in Breitbart:

Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, founders of the eponymous fashion house, have come out strongly against gay marriage, the notion of gay families, and the use of surrogacy to procreate.

The billionaire pair, who used to be romantically linked, gave an interview with the Italian magazine Panorama, in which they said, “The only family is the traditional one. No chemical offspring and rented uterus. Life has a natural flow; there are things that cannot be changed.”

They also said, “Procreation must be an act of love.”

“I call children of chemistry, synthetic children. Uteri for rent, semen chosen from a catalogue,” Dolce stated.

Gabanna said, “The family is not a fad. In it there is a supernatural sense of belonging.”

The pair have long been outspoken about gay marriage. In 2013, when the London Telegraph asked them if they had ever considered getting married, they answered, “What? Never!” Dolce said, “I’m a practicing Catholic.”

Gabbana told the Daily Mail in 2006, “I am opposed to the idea of a child growing up with two gay parents.”

One wonders: are homosexuals Dolce and Gabbana now “hateful” because they agree with Austin Ruse and yours truly on marriage? Smearing people as “haters” merely and fundamentally because they act upon their moral opposition to homosexual behavior is…hateful, intellectually lazy and dirty politics. It is akin to accusing people who oppose abortion of “hating women.” True “hate” is something that is objectively discerned, not ideologically concocted. There are homosexual advocates who oppose AFTAH who are not hateful, and there are others like Jervis who resort to hateful barbs (e.g., the New York City blogger demonizes Tea Party followers as “teabaggers”).

The SPLC tries to argue that it is not the actual traditional beliefs of pro-family groups that merit its loaded “hate” designation, but the way these groups make their case. (Smartly, the SPLC leaves a few major pro-family groups off its list to feign impartiality.) This is preposterous on its face: the SPLC has tarred dozens of pro-family organizations opposed to the LGBT agenda as “haters,” yet not a single homosexual activist group or leader (hello…Dan Savage)–despite the fact that the latter often use malicious–some would say evil–tactics to wage political and cultural war against their enemies. In addition, the SPLC has partnered or worked with two of the most vicious homosexual activist groups, Truth Wins Out and the Gay Liberation Network, both based in Chicago.

SPLC: Homosexuals cannot change

Moreover, the SPLC’s shoddy criteria for hate-labeling are arbitrary and self-serving–they just happen to match the tendentious Talking Points of the Homosexual Lobby. For example, the SPLC’s “Myth #10”–of “falsehoods” propagated by alleged “hate groups”–is that “Gay people can choose to leave homosexuality.” Perhaps the SPLC should interview a happy ex-“gay” like Stephen Black or ex-lesbian-turned-pastor Charlene Cothran; these two and many more would dispute that their radically changed, Christian lives are somehow mythical.

With the biased media providing little accountability for such reckless tactics, the leftist “hate” game goes on. Because the SPLC and its “Amen Corner” of LGBT activists have figured out that–especially in this Internet age–engaging in name-calling and ugly smears is easier than making an actual argument.