When news broke last month that the Southern Poverty Law Center was laying off about a quarter of its staff, some Christian leaders rejoiced.
“About time! They lost their way years ago,” tweeted former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who is also an ordained pastor. “They are a hate group that labels others ‘hate group.’”
Huckabee is among those who believe that the center, which became famous amid its fight against the Ku Klux Klan, unfairly lumped conservative faith-based groups in with violent racists.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has been highly critical of organizations that use religious freedom law to fight for changes to laws promoting LGBTQ rights, as the Deseret News previously reported.
Southern Poverty Law Center layoffs
The recent layoffs at the Southern Poverty Law Center came amid a company restructuring, according to The Associated Press.
Plans are currently being formed to combine some teams and end less essential programs, the article said, noting that the organization recently went through a leadership change.
“The Southern Poverty Law Center said the reductions were ‘a difficult but necessary decision to focus and align our work with our programmatic priorities and goals,’” The Associated Press reported.
Although the center is best known for its hate groups watchlist, it works on a variety of other initiatives aimed at combatting racism, protecting vulnerable communities and strengthening democracy.
Its latest report on hate and extremism took a look at 1,430 different groups operating in the U.S., including some law firms that focus on religious freedom cases.
Faith groups as hate groups
The Deseret News explored the tension between such law firms and the Southern Poverty Law Center in a 2017 article on the rise of name-calling in politics.
Faith-based organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom and Liberty Counsel told the Deseret News that they felt it was unfair to be labeled a “hate group” over their work on lawsuits related to LGBTQ rights since those lawsuits centered on religious freedom claims and since their firms worked on a wide variety of other cases.
“Faith traditions within the three major Abrahamic religions hold that same-sex marriage is harmful and wrong. To reduce (that belief) to hatred and bigotry is just wrong,” said Richard Mast, an attorney for Liberty Counsel, to the Deseret News in 2017.
In a statement, Southern Poverty Law Center told the Deseret News at the time that conservative Christian groups earn the “hate group” label when they make false or exaggerated claims about the LGBTQ community in order to win support for their lawsuits.
“A major misconception is that the SPLC considers opposition to marriage equality or the belief that homosexuality is a sin as the sole basis for the hate group label. That is false,” the statement said.
The faith-related groups that have been labeled “hate groups” don’t accept that explanation, which is why some more conservative Christians have cheered the Southern Poverty Law Center’s recent layoffs.
In a guest column for Fox News, the Alliance Defending Freedom’s Jeremy Tedesco wrote that Southern Poverty Law Center is suffering now due to what he feels was a problematic definition of “hate.”
“For years (the center) has lumped together KKK holdouts with mainstream conservatives and conservative organizations — including my employer, Alliance Defending Freedom — in a blatant attempt to push us to the margins of American life,” Tedesco argued.