When the Southern Poverty Law Center released its updated list of anti-gay hate groups, Liberty Counsel didn’t achieve the designation, but that hasn’t stopped Matt Barber from repeatedly attacking the SPLC in his columns and on his radio program … and it was once again the topic of discussion this week as Barber and Shawn Akers accused the SPLC of attacking the Religious Right as a way to raise money and claimed that the group was now attacking the “very Christian leadership that led the Civil Rights movement”:

Barber: The SPLC has grabbed the tiger by the tail and now they get the teeth. They are really marginalizing themselves outside of a very liberal echo chamber; the SPLC has really embarrassed itself and really marginalized itself in the mainstream.

Akers: You know, it’s kind of funny Matt, this is one of those groups that has in recent times prided itself on being among the most open-minded in the nation, they would be leaders in being open-minded and they’ve sacrificed any shred of legitimacy that they could have held claim to in recent times by basically adopting this definition of a hate group – it’s if you disagree with the Southern Poverty Law Center, you are a hate group. If you disagree with them on social matters – and chief among those would be sexuality and marriage – if you disagree with them on that, you are going to be listed, especially if you have voice in public circles, you’re going to be listed as a hate-monger, and as a hate villain, and in their great hope a hate criminal at some time in the future if they can get legislation through that they would like. Now the problem with that for them is one that you pointed out: it smacks of desperation.

We had great success in remedying the evil of discrimination and you can see that that success probably caused a dip in the funds of somebody like the Southern Poverty Law Center and they have sold out and begun acting like a Washington bureaucracy that says we have to have a new windmill to tilt at and it’s going to be everybody that disagrees with us.

Barber: And now they find themselves fighting against the very Christian leadership that led the Civil Rights movement, the very Christians that fought for abolition under the Republican Party, under Abraham Lincoln, now they have those very Christians in the cross-hairs.