Attacking hate groups

Readers have asked for evidence that gays and Jews promote anti-family policies. Wash. Post columnist Dana Milbank writes:

Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest gay rights organization, posted an alert on its blog Tuesday: “Paul Ryan Speaking at Hate Group’s Annual Conference.”

The “hate group” that the Republicans’ vice presidential candidate would be addressing? The Family Research Council, a mainstream conservative think tank founded by James Dobson and run for many years by Gary Bauer.

The day after the gay rights group’s alert went out, 28-year-old Floyd Lee Corkins II walked into the Family Research Council’s Washington headquarters and, according to an FBI affidavit, proclaimed words to the effect of “I don’t like your politics” — and shot the security guard. Corkins, who had recently volunteered at a gay community center, was carrying a 9mm handgun, a box of ammunition and a backpack full of Chick-fil-A — the company whose president recently spoke out against gay marriage. ...

Human Rights Campaign isn’t responsible for the shooting. Neither should the organization that deemed the FRC a “hate group,” the Southern Poverty Law Center, be blamed for a madman’s act. But both are reckless in labeling as a “hate group” a policy shop that advocates for a full range of conservative Christian positions, on issues from stem cells to euthanasia.

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? ...

The National Organization for Marriage, which opposes gay marriage, is right to say that the attack “is the clearest sign we’ve seen that labeling pro-marriage groups as ‘hateful’ must end.”

He is right. The FRC is not a hate group. Even if it made a mischaracterization of a movement back in 1999, so what? There are liberal groups who lie all the time.

There are feminist groups who often devalue fathers and other men. They deny the facts and promote policies harmful to children. Why aren't they hate groups?

There is currently an edit war over the Wikipedia articles on the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Family Research Council. They want to say that the SPLC has the endorsement of the FBI, that it conducts spying for the FBI, and that the FRC is a hate group.

This is crazy. The SPLC is the hate group. It is run by Jews who hate Christians and promote ethnic animosity. They are also racist and anti-American.

Steve Sailer comments on this quote:

"To be against gay marriage, at least in the views of most liberals ..., is to disqualify oneself from society as a hateful bigot."

I think that exemplifies the main driving force of modern liberalism. It's not intellectual. ...

Gay marriage, for instance, is a trivial issue in real world terms, but it has become incredibly important to liberals precisely because it brands huge numbers of their fellow citizens as Dalits for them to hate and feel morally superior to.

Dalits are low-caste Indians.

Again, gays and Jews are only about 2% each of the population, and they are not all anti-family. But most of them are liberals, and their leaders are carrying out a hate campaign against the family.

I would not care about same-sex marriage if it only involved what 2% of the population does in private. But the movement is out to destroy the idea that kids have a right to a mom and a dad, and they will conduct a hate campaign against anyone who disagrees.

An atheist site

Welcome to the sixteenth installment in my series where I ask the men who are leaders in the secular communities to speak out against the hate we have seen primarily directed at women. ... Phil speaks to us about the recent uptick in the amount and intensity of online sexism and thuggery and explains how and why each individual must fight to stop it.

Really? Atheists hate women? I doubt it.

If you chase down the complaints, you will find a little anecdote about how a nerdy atheist guy clumsily asked a nerdy atheist woman out on an elevator, and the woman did not know what to say, and later threw a feminist tantrum about it. Atheists conferences have been filled with discussions about whether someone acted with bad manners.

These stories are much too trivial to be called hate. Meanwhile, there are organized groups of feminists, leftists, lawyers, psychologists, and others who are systematically putting men in jail, taking their kids away, and destroying the family. Those are the hate groups.

If the Christian pro-family groups are hate groups, then surely the NY Times is a much bigger hate group. It recently published two anti-dad articles that misrepresented the research to draw anti-dad conclusions. I criticized one of the articles here. Here is the letter to the editor from the researcher:

The Importance of Dads
Published: August 29, 2012
To the Editor:

Two recent opinion articles cite my research to support their claims that fathers aren’t necessary for a thriving household (“In Defense of Single Motherhood,” by Katie Roiphe, Aug. 12, and “Men, Who Needs Them?,” by Greg Hampikian, Aug. 25). That does not fairly describe my work.

Income security is very important. But fathers in most cases are critical contributors to family income. And income security is only half the story.

Emotional security — which children develop from living in stable families where they can form lasting relationships with adults who stick around for the long run — is also important. Stable homes with one parent are rare. More often in single-mother households, children meet, attach and then say goodbye to men who are only temporarily connected to the family.

Two parents committed to each other and to raising a child together are more likely to provide the economic and emotional security children need. That large numbers of fathers cannot provide economic and emotional security constitutes a serious social problem.

SARA McLANAHAN
Princeton, N.J., Aug. 28, 2012

The writer is a professor of sociology and public affairs and director of the Center for Research on Child Well-Being at Princeton University.

Of course this feminist professor ends up trashing dads in the last sentence anyway. She has spent most of her career publishing bogus attacks on dads.

Notice also how her letter is carefully worded to be acceptable to the gay lobby. She says, "Two parents committed to each other and to raising a child together". The research actually favors two parents raising their own child.

McLanahan refuses to put any of her papers on her web site, but I found one of her papers:

To summarize briefly, we find that children who grow up apart from their biological fathers do less well, on average, than children who grow up with both natural parents. They are less likely to finish high school and attend college, less likely to find and keep a steady job, and more likely to become teen mothers.

So far, so good. That is what all the studies show. Kids who are reared by single moms or step-fathers do not do as well.

The problem occurs when she injects her own feminist theorizing. Instead of simply arguing that dads should have better child custody decisions, she argued that dads should pay more money and be jailed more if they don't:

Why would this be so? Why would the loss of a biological father reduce a child's chances of success? We argue that when fathers live apart from their child, they are less likely to share their incomes with the child, and, consequently, mothers and children usually experience a substantial decline in their standard of living when the father moves out. ...

Stronger child support enforcement may also redress the other two factors that determine children's resilience in the face of family disruption: the loss of parental resources and the loss of community. Fathers who are required to pay child support are likely to demand more time with their children and a greater say in how they are raised. Such demands should lead to more social capital between the father and child. Similarly, greater father involvement is likely to lead to less residential mobility, retarding the loss of social capital in the community.

This is crazy. The whole child support enforcement scheme is designed so that the more the dads pay, the less they see their kids.

If it is really fair for the SPLC to call the FRC a hate group, then it is also fair to call the NY Times, McLanahan, and others purveyors of hate speech. They are advocating policies that put good dads in jail, to the detriment of their kids. The FRC is not advocating harm to anyone.