Matt Barber - Bloody Hands: The Southern Poverty Law Center

Long before homosexual activist Floyd Corkins entered the D.C.-based Family Research Council (FRC) with the intent to commit mass murder, I warned from the rooftops that the hard-left Southern Poverty Law Center’s anti-Christian “hate group” propaganda might spur such bloodshed. With a column headlined, “Liberal violence rising,” I wrote, “The SPLC’s dangerous and irresponsible (‘hate group’) disinformation campaign can embolden and give license to like-minded, though less stable, left-wing extremists, creating a climate of true hate. Such a climate is ripe for violence.”

Tragically, my deepest fears were realized.

Then, in August, days after Corkins was heroically disarmed by FRC employ Leo Johnson, whom Corkins shot in the arm, I penned another column titled “Fanning the flames of left-wing violence.” I plead with the SPLC to end its “dishonest and reprehensible” strategy of “juxtaposing FRC and other Christian organizations with violent extremist groups” in a transparent effort to marginalize them.

“I appeal to your sense of goodwill. This is not a game. Lives are at stake,” I implored. “I know you have good employees (I’ve met some) who believe they’re doing the right thing; so, please, validate that belief. It’s time to remove your metaphorical ‘hate group’ Star of David from mainstream Christian organizations before another of your ideological allies spills blood.”

I no longer believe the SPLC has a sense of goodwill. In fact, based on FBI evidence and the group’s own actions (and inaction), I and many others are left with no other inference but this: The SPLC – a left-wing extremist fundraising behemoth – may be intentionally inciting anti-Christian violence.

Just days ago, Corkins pled guilty to a number of charges, including domestic terrorism. FBI evidence revealed that he was both motivated by and utilized the SPLC’s “anti-gay hate map” to target and locate his intended Christian mass murder victims.

Further evidence reveals that the “hate map” – more accurately labeled “hit map” – even provided the exact location of FRC and other Christian groups found on Corkins’ hit-list with little red dots to helpfully pinpoint their precise locations.

Corkins told the FBI after the shooting that he intended to “kill as many as possible and smear the Chick-fil-A sandwiches (which he brought with him) in victims’ faces.” Prosecutors said that he planned to leave FRC after the attack and go to another conservative group to continue his reign of terror. A handwritten list of three other groups was found with his belongings while an investigation of Corkins’ computer revealed that he identified his targets on the SPLC website. The other groups were also maliciously listed by the SPLC as “hate groups.”

Motive to kill? Fomented. Who to kill? Provided. Where to kill? Pinpointed, with easy access to driving directions. The only thing the SPLC did not do was purchase Corkins’ gun and drive him to the crime scene.

Here’s why, to my own aghast bewilderment, I’m left with little choice but to believe the SPLC may be intentionally inciting anti-Christian violence. As noted by the FRC, “Even after an attempted mass murder of the FRC staff, the ‘hate map’ is still prominently featured on the SPLC website today – which shocks most conservative pundits.”

“Shocks” is an understatement.

“When Congresswoman Giffords and several others were shot in Arizona by Jared Loughner, the left went into overdrive blaming Sarah Palin for a map that had a list of political targets on it. After the fact, we learned that Loughner was apolitical and he clearly had not used Sarah Palin’s map of political targets. That did not stop the left from blaming the right,” noted RedState’s Erick Erickson. “By the way, Palin took down her target map after the controversy. The Southern Poverty Law Center? Crickets …”

What other explanation is there? I understand that it’s difficult to admit you’re wrong, especially when the scheme seemed so delicious at the time. But once FBI evidence conclusively proves that you were, to a large degree, responsible for inciting an act of domestic terrorism, most reasonable people would take a deep breath, take a step back, admit fault and hobble forward in an effort to rehabilitate a reputation in ruin.

Is the SPLC a left-wing extremist group? Absolutely. Are they anti-Christian? Without a doubt. But few would have believed, until now, that they might intentionally, with malice aforethought, seek to incite anti-Christian bloodshed.

Scandalously, the Obama administration continues to maintain deep ties with this radical organization.

“The Southern Poverty Law Center has a long history of maliciously slandering pro-family groups with language and labels that incite hatred and undermine civil discourse,” said Mat Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel. “In the issues of family and marriage, Christians are literally in the crosshairs of radical homosexual activists, and the SPLC is fueling the hatred and providing the targets. The SPLC should be held accountable for its reckless acts. Even more disturbing than the SPLC’s irresponsible behavior is the fact that the Obama administration is in bed with this group,” said Staver.

“It is ironic that Christians who believe in natural marriage have been isolated by radical homosexual activists and demonized as ‘homophobes’ and ‘haters,’” he concluded.

Weeks before Corkins pleaded guilty of terrorism and assault with intent to kill, a study from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point entitled “Challengers from the Sidelines: Understanding America’s Violent Far Right” said the “violent far right” exhibits an intense fear or dislike of foreign people, “including people with alternative sexual preferences.” The SPLC’s warped view of reality has been adopted by the Obama administration.

“What the SPLC and other homosexual activists are doing is intentional and dangerous,” said Staver. “It is time to end the dangerous rhetoric and resume a civil discourse on the subject of natural marriage and morality.”

Indeed if, God forbid, this SPLC “hate group” propaganda leads to another act of left-wing terrorism like that at FRC, this dangerous group should be held legally – perhaps even criminally liable.

In the meantime, to the media, I say this: If you dare, even for a moment, give any credence whatsoever to this deadly SPLC “hate group” nonsense, you too will have blood on your hands.

SPLC, you’re no longer fooling anyone.

Stop fooling yourselves.

Matt Barber

Matt Barber served as Policy Director for Cultural Issues with Concerned Women for America before joining Liberty University School of Law in 2008. In addition to his Juris Doctorate degree, Dean Barber holds a Master of Arts in Public Policy from Regent University and a Bachelor of Science in Organizational Management from Colorado Christian University.

Matt Barber is a published freelance writer, many newspapers and online publications run his columns, including the Washington Examiner, Washington Times, Insight magazine, WorldNetDaily.com, TownHall.com and many others.

Matt Barber was a law enforcement officer for three years and a corporate fraud investigator for five years.

Matt Barber served twelve years in the Army National Guard, and was an undefeated professional boxer, retiring in 2004. Several times prior to turning pro, he was a state and regional Golden Gloves champion, competing in the 1992 Western Olympic Trials and winning a Gold Medal in the 1993 Police and Fire World Games.

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Star Parker - Chicago Strike Shows Why we Need School Choice

It says something about today’s public education reality that the two sides in the teachers’ union dispute in Chicago are the union and the mayor.

Allegedly the point of schools is to educate children. But which side in this dispute has sole interest in children and their parents?

The answer, of course, is neither side.

Unions are about the economic interests of the teachers. The mayor is about his budget and the economic interests of the city.

No one solely represents the interests of the kids.

It’s not to say that the union or the mayor has no interest in the quality of education being delivered. But this is just part of their agenda.

Do union members have to worry that their jobs will be gone if children don’t get the best possible education? No. Does the mayor have to worry that his job will be gone or his career over if children don’t get the best possible education? No.

In private sector labor disputes, sitting across from the union representative is the representative of a private company. The survival of that firm depends on its ability to serve its customers. Its labor cost is one line item in the cost structure of the products it sells.

The firm negotiating with the union does have to be concerned that union demands will drive it out of business – that it won’t be able to deliver the best, most competitively priced products.

This helps explains why private sector union membership has dropped dramatically. In the mid-1950’s, 36 percent of the private sector labor force belonged to unions. Today it is less than 7 percent.

Union demands that cause uncompetitive pricing or poorer quality products threaten the survival of the firm because it cannot serve its customers. The customer is king.

If the customer doesn’t like what he’s getting, that customer will go somewhere else.

But what about parents and kids? They have no where else to go. In Chicago, they are stuck with whatever outcome the confrontation between the mayor and the union produces because there is no competition.

Beyond this, even the best public school teachers have their hands tied because they cannot provide what so many of these kids need. A structure of values, discipline, and a clear sense of meaning and right and wrong.

The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof writes, “In fairness, it’s true that the main reason inner city schools do poorly isn’t teachers’ unions, but poverty.”

But now we have a chicken and egg problem. Are kids not getting educated because they are poor or are they poor because the public schools, generation after generation, provide such poor education in these communities?

Poverty is preponderant among single parent households, and single parent households have grown dramatically in black communities over the last half century. In 1970, 38 percent of black births were to unmarried women. Today it’s over 70 percent.

Should we consider it an accident that over this same period a cultural transformation took place in this country? Court decisions removed prayer and traditional religious values from our public schools. Is it worth considering that the purge of traditional values from public schools and widespread family breakdown were two sides of the same cultural coin?

I think so. But whether you agree with me or not, parents who want their children in a school teaching traditional values, rather than the moral relativism endemic in K-12 public schools today, should have this choice in an allegedly free country.

Eighty six percent of the kids in Chicago’s public schools are minority kids from low income families. Meaning and teaching of right and wrong is what these kids need. Whatever compromise the unions and the mayor reach won’t matter to them.

What they need is school choice.

Star Parker

Star Parker is founder and president of CURE, the Center for Urban Renewal and Education, a 501c3 think tank which explores and promotes market based public policy to fight poverty, as well as author of the newly revised Uncle Sam's Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America's Poor and What We Can do About It.

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Star Parker - Impacting Poverty

The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously observed that “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”

It’s an admonition not taken particularly seriously by today’s political left. They embrace, extol, advocate ideas and policies based on what they wish were true, regardless of how often and consistently their ideas have been proven wrong.

Take, for instance, the minimum wage.

Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-Ill) wants to again raise the minimum wage – from $7.25 to $10.00 - despite an abundance of experience that doing so accomplishes exactly the opposite of what minimum wage advocates claim is their objective. Make low income earners better off.

Why doesn’t McDonalds increase the price of Big Macs if they want to sell more? It’s pretty obvious that consumers will buy less of a product when its price goes up.

So why is it not equally obvious that consumers of labor – employers – will buy less of a class of labor if the price of that labor increases?

The data bears out this very simple logic. We have a long history showing correlation between increases in the minimum wage and corresponding increases in unemployment in those sectors that earn in this range – the young and unskilled.

University of Michigan economist Mark Perry has calculated that over the period of the last minimum wage increase – increasing it from $5.15 in 2007 to $7.25 in 2009 – teen unemployment increased 5 percentage points more than the general increase in unemployment over that period.

Nevertheless, Rep. Jackson feels entitled to his own facts. At his press conference announcing his bill to raise the minimum wage, he said, “Now it’s time to bail out working people who work hard every day and they still only make $7.25. The only way to do that is to raise the minimum wage.”

Ron Haskins, Co-Director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution, recently testified before the Senate Finance Committee on hearings on poverty.

Among the factors that he identified as the causes of poverty is declining participation in the work force. According to Haskins, between 1980 and 2009, work force participation among males declined from 74.2 percent to 67.6 percent.

However, among young black men, work rates declined from 60.9 percent in 1980 to 46.9 percent in 2009.

How exactly does Rep. Jackson think he is helping the prospects for these young black men by making it more expensive to hire them?

Haskins’ testimony presents an abundance of facts about our experience with poverty and with government-centered approaches to dealing with it. Experience generally characterized, for those that choose to consider facts, by more and more government spending getting less and less.

According to Haskins, federal government spending, per person in poverty, has tripled, since 1980. The total being spent by all levels of government – federal, state, and local – per person in poverty is now about $23,700 per person.

Despite dramatic expansion of government spending on poverty programs over the years, there has been little change in the overall rate of poverty.

What’s key in alleviating poverty?

Individual initiative and personal responsibility. According to Haskins, following three rules reduces to 2 percent the chances that an individual will wind up in poverty and increases to 72 percent their chances of winding up a middle class wage earner.

“Complete at least a high school education, work full time, and wait until 21 and get married before having a baby.”

According to Haskins’ research, those violating these three rules have a 77 percent chance of winding up in poverty.

What can government do so that our economy will grow more rapidly and generate more jobs?

Appreciate that government cannot create jobs or wealth. Only private individuals can do this. Government should do its proper job and protect lives and property of citizens and minimize getting in their way so they may work, produce, and invest.

Star Parker

Star Parker is founder and president of CURE, the Center for Urban Renewal and Education, a 501c3 think tank which explores and promotes market based public policy to fight poverty, as well as author of the newly revised Uncle Sam's Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America's Poor and What We Can do About It.

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Paul Ryan corrects those confused on combating poverty

Compassion for those in need is not a function of how much borrowed money the federal government throws at unreformed, unaccountable programs.

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan

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Star Parker - How to Keep the Poor Poor

Media personality Tavis Smiley and Princeton philosophy professor Cornell West have just published their latest contribution to American poverty propaganda, “The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto.”

The book should have a second subtitle: “How to keep the poor poor and blacks enslaved to government.” To the extent this book is taken seriously by anyone, the result can only be more, entrenched poverty.

Smiley and West’s message is simple. America today consists of a few powerful, rapacious rich people and a lot of unfortunate, exploited poor people. The rich are rich because they are lucky. The poor are poor because they are unlucky. And the only way to solve the problem is activist government to manage the American economy and redistribute wealth.

It’s as if the wealthy belong to a different species of life with no common thread of humanity linking who they are to those who have less. The idea that “haves” might have been once “have nots,” or that that they did something to become “haves” that today’s “have nots” might consider doing, never enters the equation.

Even if Smiley and West conceded that there might be some element of personal responsibility in how one’s life turns out, their portrait is of an America now so unfair, that personal responsibility is irrelevant. There is no hope for anyone to rise, according to this book, without government boosting them using other people’s money.

A good candidate for one of the more outrageous distortions, in a book filled with them, is number one on their list of “Lies about poverty that America can no longer afford.”

That number one lie is: “Poverty is a character flaw.” No way, according to the authors, is there a chance that poverty has anything to do with one’s behavior. Rather, “The 150 million Americans in or near poverty are there as result of unemployment, war, the Great Recession, corporate greed, and income inequality.”

Given this insight – that there are 150 million poor Americans whose economic condition is the result of extenuating circumstances – it is no wonder that Smiley and West never once mention what many scholars see as the major causes of poverty – poor education and family breakdown.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2011 unemployment for those without a high school diploma was 50 percent higher than those with a high school diploma and almost three times higher than those with a college degree.

According to the Census Bureau, in 2010 17.8 percent of American families with children under 18 lived in poverty. However, in households with children that had married parents, 8.4 percent lived in poverty. In households with children headed by a single mother, 39.6 percent lived in poverty.

The evidence is powerful that getting educated and getting married dramatically reduces the prospects for living in poverty. Yet apparently not sufficiently powerful to interest Smiley and West to note these factors once in their “poverty manifesto.”

Can better government policy expand opportunity for those who actually choose to get educated and live responsible lives? Certainly. But policy totally the opposite of what these authors advocate. Evidence abounds that countries with limited government and more economic freedom are far and away the most prosperous.

Despite this book’s message of the inherent hopelessness and unfairness of today’s America, the authors themselves seems to be doing quite well, selling their paperback “poverty manifesto” at $12 a pop. Apparently it’s quite good business to tell Americans that America is unfair.

Perhaps this book can be used to reduce competition for jobs by immigrants.

According to the State Department, there are currently 4.6 million visa applicants wishing to enter the United States under the family and employment preferences immigration program. They apparently haven’t gotten the word that America is no longer a land of opportunity.

Star Parker

Star Parker is founder and president of CURE, the Center for Urban Renewal and Education, a 501c3 think tank which explores and promotes market based public policy to fight poverty, as well as author of the newly revised Uncle Sam's Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America's Poor and What We Can do About It.

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Bill Whittle - Rich Man, Poor Man

Despite what you hear from the media and the Democrat party, the poor are getting richer. In fact, America's poor are so rich, we should be celebrating it. Bill Whittle has the facts to back it up.

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Mike Adams - Poverty, Rape and Abortion

Author’s Note: Every summer at Summit Ministries (see www.Summit.org) I give a speech meant to equip young pro-life students with proper rebuttals to pro-abortion choice arguments. I have been asked to reprint the speech in my column (in condensed form). I am doing so in two parts. The first part can be accessed by clicking on this link. I hope you find this – the second of two installments – both beneficial and informative.

Whenever I find myself in an extended argument about abortion I find that there are about six arguments I can expect to encounter before the argument has come to term, so to speak. But, fortunately, the six arguments all suffer from one fatal flaw, which makes them somewhat easy to rebut as long as the proponent of life stays focused on the central moral question of the abortion debate, which is “Are the unborn human?” I’ve dealt with four of the six arguments in the first installment of this series. I deal with arguments five and six below.

Argument #5: “It is wrong for a woman to be forced to give birth to a baby she cannot afford.” This argument is also remarkably calloused – so much so that it is difficult to understand how those who make it could describe themselves as “liberal.” Do we really need to start reassigning Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal to understand how profoundly sick and distasteful this argument really is? Swift wrote (satirically, of course) a proposal that suggested people eat their babies in order to relieve hunger and poverty. Pro-abortion choice arguments often sound chillingly similar.

For those who have never read Swift, I like to use a more contemporary example. In the 80s, a punk rock band calling themselves “The Dead Kennedys” wrote a song called “Kill the Poor” in which they mockingly suggested that we kill poor people as a means of eliminating poverty. That would certainly eliminate poverty. But is that really an acceptable solution? Of course, it isn’t. That was their point.

Make sure to confront abortion choice advocates with the question of whether it is permissible to kill to eliminate poverty. When you do, they will say something like this: “No, I would never advocate killing the poor. I would advocate abortion to prevent them from becoming poor people in the first place.” They are trapped once again in the untenable position of denying the personhood of the unborn. (Please review argument #1 from the first installment in this series).

Of course, there is another aspect to the poverty-as-a-defense-of-abortion argument. It is the crass argument that the mother sometimes cannot “afford” the baby. This raises another fundamental question: “Is it permissible to kill a person in order to alleviate financial stress?” If it is then I’d like to kill the banker who holds my mortgage. (I’m just kidding, folks). Of course, I cannot do that anyway since a) he is a middle-aged man and b) the Supreme Court does not authorize abortions in the 200th trimester – at least they haven’t yet!

Some pro-lifers will say that poor women should not be having babies if they cannot “afford” them. But this raises another important question: What if the poor woman’s baby is the product of a rape?

Argument #6: “It is wrong to force a woman to give birth to a baby after she has been a victim of rape (or incest, which is usually statutory rape).” Whenever I hear an argument for the rape exception I think of my friend Laura. She was adopted and later in life (when she was in her 20s) wanted to locate her birth mother and learn of the circumstances of her adoption. When she did, she learned that she was the product of a rape. I don’t have the audacity to tell her she should have been killed by an abortionist. I leave that to the compassionate liberals who over-simplify the rape issue.

Actually, “oversimplify” is too kind a term. They are exploiting the rape issue in order to avoid the central question of the debate: “Is the unborn - yes, even the product of rape - human?” I say “Of course they are!” And Laura agrees with me. If you disagree, then you may take it up with her or with others conceived in rape such as attorney and pro-life advocate Rebecca Kiessling. Their lives are hardly useless. And because their mothers had the courage to bear them, they have made a profound difference in this world – including saving countless lives with their pro-life testimony.

Whenever the issue of the rape exception is raised it is well worth mentioning Kennedy v. Louisiana, which was decided by the Supreme Court in 2008. In that already infamous case, the Court spared Kennedy from execution on the grounds that it would be Cruel and Unusual Punishment to kill a man who did not kill anyone. This was a brutal rape case – indeed among the worst I’ve ever studied. An expert in pediatric forensic medicine testified that Kennedy raped his 8-year old stepdaughter savagely to the point of causing permanent physical damage. In fact, a laceration to the left wall of her vagina had separated her cervix from the back of her vagina, causing her rectum to protrude into her vaginal structure. Put simply, Kennedy raped, sodomized, and tortured a poor little girl he was supposed to protect. Thankfully, he was easily convicted for doing so. And there is no question whatsoever as to the issue of his guilt.

But the High Court – high on their own arrogance - stated that Kennedy’s execution would not comport with “evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” This decision rested largely on the fact that most states reject the idea of execution for rape – even the rape of a child accompanied by other aggravating factors. And so this is the position in which we find ourselves today: When a woman is raped she has a constitutional right to an abortion. And the rapist has a constitutional right to life. But the unborn baby has no rights whatsoever. And they call this the mark of an “evolving” and “maturing” society?

The Kennedy case helps us to better understand another frequently employed argument for the rape exception; namely, that a woman has a right to abort in order to rid her of the memory of a horrible event. But that argument is both logically and factually flawed. Logically speaking, the woman, if granted the right to kill one person, should be entitled to kill the rapist. She should not be entitled to kill the baby! Any assertion to the contrary can be justified only by denying the personhood of the unborn. (Once again, review argument #1 from the first installment in this series).

Factually speaking, there is simply no merit to the argument that abortions either sooth the conscience or assuage the memory of rape victims. In the first place, too many women feel guilty and blame themselves in the aftermath of rape. The abortion adds another layer of guilt and trauma. Only the birth of the child can provide healing – even if the child is immediately given up for adoption. Philosophers Peter Kreeft and Frank Beckwith often point out that it is better to suffer evil than to inflict it. Planned Parenthood counselors are never inclined to raise this point. They profit from the infliction of evil upon the innocent. And they use rape victims to justify their dirty occupation.

After I have finished making all the points I wish to make, I always extend the following offer to the abortion choice advocate: “If I agree to write the exception for rape, will you be willing to lobby for the law banning abortion?” In all of my years discussing abortion, no one has taken me up on the offer. Their reaction always shows that they were never in favor of keeping abortion legal in order to protect victims of rape. They are simply using these women for political purposes.

A movement that both denies the personhood of the defenseless unborn and uses rape victims for political purposes is not one worth joining. These people do not even believe the arguments they are making. They are truly modern day Pharisees – more deserving of our ridicule than our respect.

Mike Adams

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Mike Adams

Mike Adams is a criminology professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and author of Feminists Say the Darndest Things: A Politically Incorrect Professor Confronts "Womyn" On Campus.

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Nearly One in Seven Americans Are On Food Stamps

As the battle over the national debt continues, John Stossel takes a look at the growing number of American's on food stamps, currently estimated at more than 44 million and a 61 percent increase since 2007. Is the food stamp program encouraging participants to continue living in a cycle of poverty? See what Stossel had to say to Neil Cavuto.

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