Christianity,  News,  Politics

On the FRC Shooting and “Hate” Groups

I confess that I have been watching with some disgust the lack of coverage in the national media about the shooting this week at the Family Research Council. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then you are a walking illustration of my point. If a deranged conservative had shot a security guard at the headquarters of the Human Rights Campaign, I guarantee that the news would have been as big as the Aurora shootings last month in Colorado. But this has not been the case with the FRC shooting. Case in point: The New York Times had the story on page A11.

This slantedness in the media explains why Christian groups are routinely labeled “hate groups” and “bigots” without anyone in the mainstream press batting an eye. The designation is simply tolerated because opinion-makers basically agree with the slander. Gay activists have taken up these aspersions in order to stigmatize and marginalize those who believe marriage is the union of one man and one woman, and they have found many accomplices in the press who are willing to pass along such language.

I’m grateful to see, however, at least one liberal who is intellectually honest enough to call-out the hypocrisy. In his column for The Washington Post, Dana Milbank
writes:

I disagree with the Family Research Council’s views on gays and lesbians. But it’s absurd to put the group, as the law center does, in the same category as Aryan Nations, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Stormfront and the Westboro Baptist Church. The center says the FRC “often makes false claims about the LGBT community based on discredited research and junk science.” Exhibit A in its dossier is a quote by an FRC official from 1999 (!) saying that “gaining access to children has been a long-term goal of the homosexual movement.”

Offensive, certainly. But in the same category as the KKK?

Since the shooting, conservatives have complained that the media have played down the story. This probably has less to do with bias than with the fact that nobody was killed. Still, there is something to the complaint.

I don’t agree with everything Milbank says, but I think his main point is sound. It’s absurd to label Christian groups “hate groups” simply because they support traditional marriage. That rhetoric needs to be dropped altogether. Read the rest here.

2 Comments

  • Wade Choate

    With the news media typically leaping into it’s opinion about the motivation toward any type of violence against one of their pet leftist agenda groups, this should not surprise anyone. I have no faith in anything the big networks tell me, and have not for years. Nobody in the mainstream media is making any political connections. Maybe they should read the Atlanta Journal..

    http://www.ajc.com/news/nation-world/officials-man-criticized-group-1499999.html

    I know for sure no one will be calling this a “hate-crime”…

    Regardless, God is on His throne and laughs in derision at all those who wish to loose the bonds…

  • LaNeisa Jackson

    One telling thing that Milbank quoted in his article -Late Thursday, the law center fired back at Perkins, defending its categorization of the FRC as a hate group because it “has knowingly spread false and denigrating propaganda about LGBT people.”

    This says it all. The Southern Poverty Law Center really thinks that calling homosexuality a sin is hate speech. Scripture is never more proven true as when the culture floats into this space. This fight to not label the Bible as hate speech is a huge deal and will become an even more important fight going foward.

    Thanks for engaging the battle, Denny.

Comment here. Please use FIRST and LAST name.