It’s Time for Corporate America to Ditch the Southern Poverty Law Center

The Southern Poverty Law Center recently added several mainstream parents’ groups — including Parents Defending Education, Moms for Liberty, No Left Turn in Education, and Parents’ Rights in Education — to its “hate map.” Questions now are being raised about whether the White House encouraged the SPLC to target these groups after reports that Susan Corke, director of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project, met earlier this year with National Security Council counterterrorism director John Picarelli.

Dear Corporate America: Now might be a good time to ditch reliance on the SPLC.

While the SPLC’s “hate” designation long ago ceased to be plausible proxy for actual hatred, brand-name businesses have often turned to the SPLC for guidance when deciding whether to deny service. With the SPLC targeting parents — including mothers, who, along with other women, control or influence 85 percent of consumer spending and control more than 60 percent of all personal wealth in the U.S. — corporate America would be wise to steer clear of the politicized “hate map” and explicitly cut ties with the SPLC, now.

The SPLC boasts that in 2022 it “tracked 1,225 hate and antigovernment groups across the U.S.” To be sure, that mélange includes some groups that affiliate with monstrous injustices, like the Klu Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party. But it also includes a much larger number of mainstream public-policy groups that the SPLC has decided are antigovernment merely because they take widely held positions that just happen to offend the SPLC’s radically left-wing vision of society.

Now the SPLC is targeting groups devoted to advancing and defending the right of mothers and fathers to have a say in their children’s education. Why? Because (according to the SPLC) they’re “antigovernment.” The SPLC attempts to define “antigovernment” at length, but the sheer breadth of its definition renders it incoherent. For examples, SPLC points to obvious antigovernment activities such as the 1993 tragedy at the Branch Davidian compound, the horrific 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and the effort by members of a Michigan militia to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

Amid this litany of violent acts committed by cults, terrorists, and militias, the SPLC pivots to add that some “antigovernment groups” have opposed “critical race theory” in education and spread “conspiracies about the government’s role in education.” One could be excused for suffering mental whiplash after the transition from bombing government buildings to debating curriculum policy in public schools. That sort of dishonest analogizing is like calling the SPLC a supporter of corrupt dictatorial regimes because, like Robert Mugabe, it moved some of its cash overseas.

Beyond incoherent definitions, however, in tagging parents’-rights groups on its hate map, the SPLC continues to degrade civil discourse by insisting that its political opponents are, by definition, hatemongers. There’s nothing hateful, however, about opposing the introduction to grade-school students of controversial and, in many cases, age-inappropriate concepts based on critical race and gender theories. Those ideas are the subject of good-faith debate throughout the nation. Moreover, overwhelming majorities of registered voters believe that parents have a right to know about and consent to any efforts by public schools to change a student’s gender identity.

None of this seems to matter, though, in the race to demonize ideological opponents. In many cases, feedback mechanisms would hold this sort of behavior to account. For instance, when the National School Board Association (NSBA) sent to the White House a letter in which it analogized parents’ concerned about the direction of public education to domestic terrorism and demanded that federal law enforcement take action against them, it suffered public outrage and losses of membership that ultimately drove its board to issue a public apology. Incredibly, reports showed that the NSBA coordinated with the White House before sending its letter.

While the cat’s-paw tactics may be the same, accountability for the well-heeled SPLC, with its nearly $500 million endowment and tens of millions of dollars overseas, will need to look different. The most obvious place to start is the simplest. For years, blue-chip businesses, including Amazon, Facebook, Google, Salesforce, and PayPal as well as many significant financial institutions, have turned to the SPLC for guidance or been pressured to do so.

That needs to stop. Today.

It simply makes no sense for sophisticated corporate leaders to outsource their judgment about when they should deny service to customers and business partners to an organization that can’t tell the difference between a neo-Nazi skinhead and a soccer mom at a school-board meeting — or, in the case of my own employer, Alliance Defending Freedom, a mainstream legal organization that just won its 15th U.S. Supreme Court victory in twelve years.

That sort of willful blindness can be seen only as a malicious attempt at demonization through guilt by association. And the time has come for corporate America to finally, and definitively, disclaim any reliance on it. This time, America’s parents are watching.