Bryan Fischer attacked the Southern Poverty Law Center on his American Family Radio program yesterday, accusing the SPLC of spreading “fake news” by accusing him of saying something he never said.

Fischer claimed that the SPLC has “demonized” and “vilified” him for years by falsely claiming that he once said that “blacks and minorities rut like rabbits.”

“I never said that,” Fischer insisted. “I did not say that, but they attributed it to me, they hung it around my neck like an anvil. They got the media to believe it all over the place even though it wasn’t something I even said. This is fake news, ladies and gentlemen, coming from the SPLC.”

“The SPLC tried to destroy me, tried to destroy my public reputation, tried to destroy my career by attributing to me words that I never said and they got people to believe that I’d said those things,” he continued, “and it got tagged to me, it got hung on me even though they were words that I never said.”

Fischer, of course, did say that African Americans “rut like rabbits” in a column he wrote back in 2011:

Welfare has destroyed the African-American family by telling young black women that husbands and fathers are unnecessary and obsolete. Welfare has subsidized illegitimacy by offering financial rewards to women who have more children out of wedlock. We have incentivized fornication rather than marriage, and it’s no wonder we are now awash in the disastrous social consequences of people who rut like rabbits.

As we noted earlier this year when Fischer previously tried to deny ever having made this claim, after his original column was posted on the American Family Association’s website back in 2011, the AFA quietly changed the paragraph in question to make it appear as if he hadn’t been singling out African Americans:

Welfare has destroyed the African-American family by telling young black women that husbands and fathers are unnecessary and obsolete. Welfare has subsidized illegitimacy by offering financial rewards to women who have more children out of wedlock. We have incentivized fornication rather than marriage, and it’s no wonder we are now awash in the disastrous social consequences of those who engage in random and reckless promiscuity, whether they are Caucasian, Hispanic, or African-American.

So it is not the SPLC that is lying about what Fischer said; it is Fischer who is lying about what he said while trying to blame it on the SLPC.