The SPLC Put Me On Their ‘Hate Map’ And I’m Still Paying For It

Heidi Beirich, the woman responsible for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “hate map,” is now charged with funneling SPLC donor funds into not one but two bank accounts she shared with her Neo-Nazi live-in lover. For those of us she put on the SPLC “hate map,” the schadenfreude is off the charts.

My group, Center for Family & Human Rights (C-Fam), landed on the hate list in 2013 because we became involved in an issue of international law in the country of Belize. My group has worked on issues related to life, family, and international law every day of the year since we were founded in 1997.

Like many countries with restrictive laws on sexual behavior, Belize had come under pressure from marauding left-wing lawyers at the International Commission of Jurists. Don’t let that official-sounding name fool you. They are nothing more than an NGO with no official capacity.

The ICJ had leveled its legal gaze at Belize because of its laws on homosexual behavior, and one of its claims was that Belize was obligated under existing international law to strike down these restrictive laws.

As experts on international treaty laws and norms, my group was invited to answer one question. Was there an international treaty that obligated Belize to strike down such laws? We were not asked, nor did we opine, on the wisdom of laws that restrict homosexual sexual behavior. We did not have that position then or now.

But we do know international law and let the people and the government of Belize know that there is no international treaty that even mentions homosexual behavior, let alone requires the legalization or the criminalization of sodomy. Belize was legally free to maintain those laws or to strike them down, but international law was and remains silent on the issue.

For this, we were cited in a report by Ms. Beirich called “Dangerous Liaisons: The American Religious Right & the Criminalization of Homosexuality in Belize,” and we promptly landed on the notorious SPLC “Hate Map.”

Of course, Beirich’s report did not mention any of this, that is to say, the reason we were involved in Belize. Rather, she offered up a handful of chopped-up quotes where my staff or I criticized what we called “the homosexual agenda.” I told CPAC one year that a certain UN report on violence against LGBT’s was nothing more than an attempt to add those letters as a new category of discrimination in international law. Same as Belize, this was a question of international law, the specialty of my group.

What has been the effect on our group of landing on this list? I know of two.  We were rejected from the now-defunct Amazon Smile program, where Amazon customers could donate a portion of their purchase to approved non-profits. And Fidelity Donor Advised Funds told us they would no longer allow their donors to give to us anonymously. The idea here was to scare off donors who might not want to be associated with a “hate group.” But the effect is far beyond these two.

If you go to my Wikipedia page, I am prominently listed as the president of an anti-LBGT hate group. The Wiki page of my group says the same thing. Some will say that such a listing is a badge of honor, and I certainly agree, but it has come with a cost. Some former C-Fam staffers no longer list C-Fam on their LinkedIn bios. The cost would be too high to be associated with us, even though, in some cases, they worked with us for years.

And this gets into the murky area of reputational damage. I will never know in this life all the damage that has been done to my reputation by Heidi Beirich. How many potential supporters of my group have been scared away by this designation. How many old friends googling my name find out that I am on this list and shied away?

To be sure, we have been tough critics of what I call “Big Gay,” hugely powerful groups like the Human Rights Campaign that promote laws and policies we disagree with. Moreover, my group shares the Catholic teaching that the homosexual inclination is disordered and that homosexual behavior is objectively evil. And we have supported laws that keep homosexual propaganda away from school children. But we have never taken the position, as Beirich and others charge, that “homosexuality” ought to be illegal. I am not even sure what that would mean.

But, these charges follow us wherever we go.

In 2017, one of my top staffers was chosen to sit on the U.S. delegation to the UN Commission on the Status of Women. The SPLC scolds went nuts. Beirich told NBC News that this inclusion of C-Fam on the delegation is “taking the State Department in a very ugly direction.” Jessica Stern of something called Outright said, “Maybe the violent mentality that got C-FAM labeled a hate group successfully panders to their base, but the U.S. government must ensure protection for the world’s most vulnerable people.”

The good news is that such designations do not scare off everyone. That same staffer has been a top advisor to the State Department at the UN for the past several months, and it drives the left crazy. And C-Fam was approved years ago for “Special Consultative Status with the UN Economic and Social Council. Every working day of the year, we advise UN delegations on matters of international law under negotiation.

The SPLC blacklist was created for one reason and one reason only: to destroy SPLC’s political opponents. This is what Heidi’s boss, Mark Potok, told donors on a hot mic in 2007. The additional purpose is, in the words of writer Stella Morabito, to weaponize loneliness, to make us believe that we are all alone and that others had better not step out of line. And then there is the overarching reason for the hate map, and that is to scare the sexual left into emptying their wallets and fatten the coffers of SPLC, including what appears to be the personal bank accounts of Heidi Beirich and her alleged Nazi lover.  

It should be pointed out that even this column will be considered hate by the now-disgraced Heidi Beirich and SPLC.

Austin Ruse is the longtime president of C-Fam, a New York and Washington, DC-based research group in Special Consultative Status with the UN Economic and Social Council. He is the author of five books, including the upcoming Not Just for Kings: The Secrets to a 500-Year Family (Sophia Institute Press).