Tyler O'Neil, PJ Media, June 19, 2018

No fewer than 60 organizations branded “hate groups” or otherwise attacked by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) are considering legal action against the left-wing smear factory, a Christian legal nonprofit leader confirmed to PJ Media on Tuesday. He suggested that the $3 million settlement and apology the SPLC gave to Maajid Nawaz and his Quilliam Foundation on Monday would encourage further legal action.

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Liberty Counsel filed a lawsuit against the charity navigation organization GuideStar for defamation after GuideStar adopted the SPLC’s “hate group” list. That lawsuit is ongoing.

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“This is a significant settlement,” Staver told PJ Media. “3.375 million dollars, and it did not even go to litigation; it was a result of a demand letter.”

Importantly, “the allegations that were at issue here were very similar to the allegations against the other groups,” the Liberty Counsel chairman explained. “The SPLC promotes false propaganda, demonizes and labels groups they disagree with, and that labeling has economic as well as physical consequences.”

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Staver insisted that the settlement with Nawaz “will encourage further legal action.” He suggested that the settlement “helps our lawsuit against GuideStar” and may encourage organizations that were considering suing the SPLC to actually file the paperwork.

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Furthermore, many of the “hate groups” attacked by the SPLC do not encourage hate or violence, but merely disagree with the left-wing organization’s political views. Many — like the Family Research Council (FRC), the Ruth Institute, and Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) — merely stand for marriage as between one man and one woman. The SPLC has twisted 30-year-old arguments to smear these groups, and in one egregious case the group actually quoted as hateful the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

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Jeremy Tedesco, senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), echoed this trend, saying {snip} “This situation confirms once again what commentators across the political spectrum have been saying for decades: SPLC has become a far-left organization that brands its political opponents as ‘haters’ and ‘extremists’ and has lost all credibility as a civil rights watchdog,” the ADF senior counsel added.

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“SPLC’s partisan tactics and slander have ruinous, real-world consequences for which they should not be excused; we are evaluating all our options to defend the good name of ADF, including possible legal action,” Tedesco concluded.

Staver noted that the SPLC labels groups “in order to destroy them,” and he pointed out that that characterization comes from the SPLC’s own words. The Liberty Counsel chairman also referenced a terror attack inspired by the left-wing group’s “hate map.”

In 2012, Floyd Lee Corkins III broke into the Family Research Council (FRC), aiming to kill everyone in the building. He admitted to targeting the FRC because the SPLC listed it as an “anti-gay group” on its “hate map.” {snip}

“Even the shooter last year in D.C. was a Facebook fan of the SPLC and the SPLC ran a false article saying [House Majority Whip] Steve Scaliese was a white supremacist,” Staver added. In a statement, Nawaz himself had highlighted the connection between the SPLC and James Hodgkinson, the Congressional Baseball Game shooter last summer.

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It is hard to predict how a 60-party lawsuit against the SPLC’s “hate group” labeling would play out. D. James Kennedy Ministries, the Christian nonprofit that sued Amazon and the SPLC over the “hate group” defamation last year, reported in late May that a preliminary hearing on its case was a “positive development.”

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[Editor’s Note: Coverage of the Maajid Nawaz/Quilliam Foundation settlement with SPLC is available here.]