When the Family Research Council, an evangelical Christian activist group came out in 2013 to support Chik-fil-A's charitabile foundation for its efforts in fighting the legalization of same-sex marriage, a 29 year old man by the name of Floyd Lee Corkins took it upon himself to storm the council's Washington D.C. headquarters to make a statement to oppose their conservative stance.
That statement, according to NBC News, was "to kill as many people as I could...then smear a Chicken-fil-A [sic] sandwich on their face." True enough, Collins had at the time 15 Chick-fil-A sandwiches in his backpack, which also carried 50 rounds of 9mm ammunition that he would use on the FRC staff members. He was prevented from succeeding thanks to the brave security guard, Leonardo Johnson, who despite being shot in the arm was able to stop Corkins.
According to Yahoo! News, the gunman used the Southern Poverty Law Center's "hate map" to target the FRC. Corkins at the time said he wanted to "to make a statement against the people who work in that building...and with their stance against gay rights and Chick fil-A." He later pleaded guilty to committing an act of terrorism and faced up to 25 years in prison.
Today, just a day after the ninth anniversary of Corkins' attack on the FRC, the Christian group still remains on the SPLC's "hate map," a divisive scheme that uses the label "hate group" to "exaggerate hate in a fundraising scheme" by branding conservative and Christian organizations as one and place them in categories such as those as the Ku Klux Klan, the report said.
"Nothing speaks to the SPLC's inhumanity as much as its behavior after the shooting at FRC," retired Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin, who now serves as the FRC's executive vice president, told Fox News. "Rather than remove the map used by a terrorist to attempt to kill dozens of people, the SPLC doubled down and even expanded its list to include other non-violent conservative, Christian and parent organizations who opposed the SPLC's political agenda."
Boykin argued, "It is the intention of the SPLC to fix animus and hostility on the organizations it places on its hate map." He pointed out how SPLC had added conversative and Christian organizations on the "hate map," including Alliance Defending Freedom, a law firm specializing in fighting for Christian causes and has won multiple Supreme Court cases for conservatives. ADF was added by SPLC to their "hate map" in 2016. A year later, they added the Christian ministry D. James Kennedy Ministries (DJKM) to the "hate map" list.
Mark Potok, a former SPLC spokesman, admitted in 2007 that they do not "monitor hate groups," but rather, "Our aim in life is to destroy these groups, completely destroy them."
"We're not trying to change anybody's mind. We're trying to wreck the groups. We're trying to destroy them. Not to send them to prison unfairly or to take their free speech rights away, but as a political matter to destroy them," Potok reiterated his point in 2008.
A quick look at the SPLC's hate map shows that the "hate groups" they label as such fall into only a few categories: "anti-immigrant," "anti-LGBTQ," "anti-Muslim," "General Hate" and "white nationalist." Groups with obvious hatred against Christians are not included in the list.
A separate Fox News report showed that some left-leaning organizations such as the SPLC have used "hate" labels to target charitable organizations and force them into blacklisting conservative groups. Even Big Tech giants such as Amazon use SPLC's "hate groups" to determine which organizations should be recipients of its Amazon Smile charity program.
