Topic: WorldNetDaily
Bob Unruh writes in a May 14 WorldNetDaily article:
An organization that for 30 years has promoted religious liberty, championed the nation’s foundational Judeo-Christian values, worked to protect marriage and defended human life is challenging Duke University to keep its reputation unsullied by avoiding an entanglement with the Southern Poverty Law Center, which was linked to domestic terrorism through a recent court case in Washington.
Officials with Traditional Values Coalition wrote a letter to Duke President Richard H. Brodhead and Provost Peter Lange after it was revealed the school agreed to take the archives of the SPLC and store them.
How is the SPLC linked to "domestic terrorism"? Not for anything it did or any act of violence it committed. Unruh eventually gets around to explaining: Floyd Corkins, who shot a security guard at the Family Research Council headquarters, claimed to have gotten information on anti-gay groups from the SPLC's website. That's it.
If that's being " linked to domestic terrorism," then anti-abortion group Operation Rescue is even more closely linked to domestic terrorism through its actual physical contact with Scott Roeder, who murder abortion doctor George Tiller.
Unruh uncritically repeats the TVC's attacks on the SPLC and its false claim that the SPLC's "hate group" designation for the FRC and other anti-gay groups is used "to label anyone with whom they disagree on biblical morality. ... “If you are pro-life, if you oppose gay marriage, if you stand up for religious freedom … you’re counted among the hate groups."
In fact, the SPLC has explained:
The SPLC has listed the FRC as a hate group since 2010 because it has knowingly spread false and denigrating propaganda about LGBT people — not, as some claim, because it opposes same-sex marriage. The FRC and its allies on the religious right are saying, in effect, that offering legitimate and fact-based criticism in a democratic society is tantamount to suggesting that the objects of criticism should be the targets of criminal violence.
As the SPLC made clear at the time and in hundreds of subsequent statements and press interviews, we criticize the FRC for claiming, in Perkins’ words, that pedophilia is “a homosexual problem” — an utter falsehood, as every relevant scientific authority has stated. An FRC official has said he wanted to “export homosexuals from the United States.” The same official advocated the criminalizing of homosexuality.
Unruh also fails to mention the TVC's conflict of interest: It's also on the SPLC's anti-gay "hate group" list for repeating many of the same lies about homosexuality that the FRC does:
In 1985, Sheldon suggested forcing AIDS victims into “cities of refuge.” In 1992, columnist Jimmy Breslin said that Sheldon told him that “homosexuals are dangerous. They proselytize. They come to the door, and if your son answers and nobody is there to stop it, they grab the son and run off with him. They steal him. They take him away and turn him into a homosexual.” Sheldon later denied that he made the comments, but his website today includes strikingly similar language: “[S]ince homosexuals can’t reproduce, they will simply go after your children for seduction and conversion to homosexuality.” Elsewhere, it claims that “[t]he effort to push adult/child sex … is part of the overall homosexual movement.”
The TVC also asserts that “it is evident that homosexuals molest children at a far greater rate than do their heterosexual counterparts” — a falsehood based on conflating male-male molestation with homosexuality. Gays, it says, molest children at “epidemic rates,” adding: “As homosexuals continue to make inroads into public schools, more children will be molested and indoctrinated into the world of homosexuality. Many of them will die in that world.” With regard to LGBT teen suicides, TVC, under the headline “Homosexual Urban Legends,” claims that “[t]he cold, hard fact is that teens who are struggling with homosexual feelings are more likely to be sexually molested by a homosexual school counselor or teacher than to commit suicide over their feelings of despair.”
Unruh doesn't seem to find the truth very interesting -- but then, WND is not paying to tell the truth, is it?
