Dana Milbank penned an opinion piece in the Washington Post on the August 16 in regard to the recent shooting at the Family Research Council. In Hateful speech on hate groups, he falsely equates hate speech with the hatred of hate speech.
Milbank is a frequent political commentator on MSNBC’s markedly left-leaning news programs, so in my opinion, he should know better.
Human Rights Campaign isn’t responsible for the shooting. Neither should the organization that deemed the FRC a “hate group,” the Southern Poverty Law Center, be blamed for a madman’s act. … But both are reckless in labeling [them] as a “hate group” … [emphasis added]
He then describes FRC as an innocuous Christian conservative “policy shop,” admits that they lie about the LGBT community through “discredited research and junk science,” uses the example that the FRC promotes the idea that gays are child molesters, yet finds it “absurd” that the SPLC categorizes them with the KKK.
Milbank goes on to side with the National Organization for Marriage’s complaint that they are unfair targets of being called hateful, and accepts that they are truly a “pro-marriage” group, instead of the anti-gay industry cog that they are.
[The] Southern Poverty Law Center should stop listing a mainstream Christian advocacy group alongside neo-Nazis and Klansmen. [emphasis added]
I completely disagree. The FRC, NOM and the rest of the anti-gay industry’s character assassinations and demonization that the LGBT community endures is meant to accomplish one thing: the criminalization of all things gay. There is NO equivalence with their immoral propaganda campaign and exposing it for what it is.
Christian conservative leaders and their only-too-willing followers appear to have one goal in life — to get what they want by ANY means possible.
As I see it, we are only one tea party, or tea party-friendly president and congress away from the promotion of the persecution of LGBT expression of any kind.
So, no, Mr. Milbank, I don’t think it is at all absurd to classify these “pro-marriage,” “pro-family” hate groups in with groups like the KKK.