Christian Group Is Suing SPLC And Amazon Over False ‘Hate Group’ Map

Last week, CNN published a highly controversial “hate map.” The map supposedly shows the locations of various “hate groups” across the nation.

Just one problem.  Southern Poverty Law Center compiled the list and included groups, such as “American Family Association, Family Research Council, Alliance Defending Freedom, Liberty Counsel and Pacific Justice Institute.” In fact, SPLC considers the Family Research Council a “hate group” because it supports traditional marriage and “often makes false claims about the LGBT community based on discredited research and junk science.”

Yeah.

You can read more about the guide here.

All that being said, some groups are taking action.

On Tuesday, D. James Kennedy Ministries (DJKM) filed a lawsuit against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the charity navigation organization GuideStar, and Amazon for defamation, religious discrimination, and trafficking in falsehood. The SPLC listed DJKM as a “hate group,” while GuideStar also categorized it in those terms, and Amazon kept the ministry off of its charity donation program, Amazon Smile.

SPLC has listed DJKM as an “anti-LGBT hate group.”

“The religious right in America has employed a variety of strategies in its efforts to beat back the increasingly confident LGBT rights movement,” SPLC states on its page. “One of those has been defamation. Many of its leaders have engaged in the crudest type of name-calling, describing LGBT people as ‘perverts’ with ‘filthy habits’ who seek to snatch the children of straight parents and ‘convert’ them to gay sex.”

“They have disseminated disparaging ‘facts’ about gays that are simply untrue — assertions that are remarkably reminiscent of the way white intellectuals and scientists once wrote about the ‘bestial’ black man and his supposedly threatening sexuality,” SPLC adds.

The Christian ministry is hitting back against those false claims.

“We embarked today on a journey to right a terrible wrong. Those who knowingly label Christian ministries as ‘hate’ groups, solely for subscribing to the historic Christian faith, are either woefully uninformed or willfully deceitful. In the case of the Southern Poverty Law Center, our lawsuit alleges the latter,”  Dr. Wright said in a statement.

“These false and illegal characterizations have a chilling effect on the free exercise of religion and on religious free speech for all people of faith,” he added.  “After having given the SPLC an opportunity to retract, we have undertaken this legal action, seeking a trial by a jury of our peers, to preserve our own rights under the law and to defend the religious free speech rights of all Americans.”

The lawsuit laid out charges against the SPLC, GuideStar, and Amazon. “SPLC acted knowingly, intentionally, and with actual malice in publishing the Hate Map that included the Ministry and in publishing the SPLC Transmissions to GuideStar that included the ministry,” the suit alleged. “SPLC’s conduct in making these publications was beyond the reckless disregard for the truth standard required by Alabama law for punitive damages.”

 

The suit claimed that “the Ministry suffered special damages in its exclusion from the AmazonSmile program as a result of SPLC’s publication of the Hate Map and the SPLC Transmissions.”

 

Specifically, DJKM brought the suit under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for religious discrimination, under the Lanham Act for trafficking in false or misleading descriptions of the services offered under the ministry’s trademarked name, and for defamation under Alabama common law arising from “the publication and distribution of information that libels the Ministry’s reputation and subjects the Ministry to disgrace, ridicule, odium, and contempt in the estimation of the public.”

“Nowhere in the purpose or action of the Ministry is there HATE or any room for HATE,” the lawsuit adds.

That’s all this really comes down to. SPLC lied. DJKM isn’t some hateful anti-LGBT group. It’s a Christian ministry that upholds Biblical values. Is that no longer allowed?

“The basis for SPLC’s declaration that the Ministry is a hate group is that the Ministry espouses and supports Biblical morals and principles concerning human sexuality,” DJKM stated, according to PJ Media.

I’m glad DJKM is suing. Supporting Christian values and traditional marriage doesn’t make a group “hateful.” SPLC cannot get away with this.

h/t PJ Media