As most breathing people now know, the Hallmark Channel, known for airing movies that families with intact moral compasses can watch with their children, upset its apple cart last week by secretly tossing in a poisoned apple for the kiddies to feast on. The apple came in the form of a commercial for the wedding planning website Zola that depicted a couple standing together at a glittering, Hallmark-worthy wedding altar at which they say their I do’s and then kiss. The poison was the smoochers were two women.

To be clear, I am not arguing that homosexual persons per se are poisonous. I am arguing that a glossy, prettified image of a deeply sinful type of union is poisonous to the minds and hearts of children who are especially vulnerable to propaganda.

Not surprisingly, parents and grandparents with intact moral compasses were shocked and angry. They felt blindsided and betrayed by a channel they had, heretofore, been able to trust. They expressed their anger and disappointment to Hallmark, many via a petition started by One Million Moms, a division of the American Family Association, which asked that Hallmark “reconsider airing commercials with same-sex relationships” and to refrain from adding “LGBTQ movies to the Hallmark Channel.” Hallmark removed the ad, and then the “LGBT” lobby took aim. Somehow, in just two days, those oppressed, silenced, marginalized, persecuted, powerless homosexuals we hear so much about were able to persuade Hallmark that it owes more to them than it does to conservatives.

On Sunday, Hallmark reversed course again and issued a sycophantic apology to men and women who mock the institution that God created to represent Christ and his bride, the church; who engage in erotic acts that the creator of the universe abhors; who indoctrinate children with a perverse sexual ideology; who seek to wash the public square clean of moral cleanliness; and who seek to punish those who hold fast to truth.

In a statement Mike Perry, Hallmark Cards president and CEO, said,

We are truly sorry for the hurt and disappointment this has caused. … We have LGBTQ greeting cards and feature LGBTQ couples in commercials. We have been recognized as one of the Human Rights Campaigns Best Places to Work. … Hallmark will be working with [the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation] to better represent the LGBTQ community across our portfolio of brands.

Note, there was no apology to theologically orthodox Christians whose identity is found in Christ and who are striving mightily to protect their children from ideas and images that violate what Scripture teaches.

This is what happens when people without an intact moral compass lead. They are buffeted about by the cultural winds and their own love of money.

After Hallmark (momentarily) pulled the ad, foolish people lost in spiritual darkness said and tweeted dumb stuff.  For example, California governor Gavin Newsome tweeted, “Same-sex marriage is the law of the land. There is no one way to love and be loved.” There is a kernel of truth in his tweet. There is not one way to love and be loved, and some of the ways to love and be loved should not include erotic acts.

Chicago mayor and lesbian Lori Lightfoot tweeted,

The holidays are a time of family, generosity and decency. @hallmarkchannel should reconsider their misguided decision to ban an ad featuring a same-sex couple. Representation is important in all forms of media—even advertising.

Lots of nonsense to unpack.

First, referring to same-sex couples as decent is indecent and, therefore, ironic. While each person in the couple may possess admirable qualities, the erotic aspect of the relationship is intrinsically indecent. Whatever love the partners feel for each other is corrupted by the misuse of their bodies.

Second, commitments to generosity do not require humans to affirm everything that other humans feel, desire, think, and do. In the spirit of generosity, would Lightfoot affirm the feelings and beliefs of theologically orthodox Christians on matters related to sexuality? In the spirit of generosity, would she agree to allowing even one streaming service to decline to show ads or programming that depict images of homoerotic relationships?

Third, Lightfoot does not really mean that all human phenomena or even all types of relationships should be represented in all forms of media. What she means is all phenomena or all types of relationships that she has concluded are morally acceptable should be represented in all forms of media.

The perpetually ignorant Chicago Tribune “lifestyle expert,” Heidi Stevens, wrote,

Movies and commercials are family-friendly when they include all sorts of families and when they acknowledge that love isn’t reserved for straight people.

Does Stevens think that in order for movies and commercials to be family-friendly, they should include polyamorous and polygamous families? What about families where the parents are two brothers who experience Genetic Sexual Attraction?

Stevens really ought to give wide berth to strawmen. No one argues that love is reserved for straight people. Many people, however, believe that sex is not only reserved for male-female relationships, but it can only occur within a male-female relationship, and they also believe that erotic acts should be reserved for only male-female relationships. Further, the source of that belief is not self-serving desire. The source of that belief is God’s holy word. And God’s word is no less legitimate than Steven’s self-originating blather.

Without defining love or proving that “love is love,” homosexual activists and their regressive allies either intentionally or ignorantly fail to distinguish between types of love. Those types are philia love (i.e., friendship), agape love (i.e., the love of God for man and man for God), storge love (i.e., familial love), and erotic love. While Stevens, GLAAD, Gavin Newsome, and all the entertainers squawking about “homophobia” last week may believe that sexual differentiation is irrelevant to erotic love, their views carry no more moral weight than the dissenting views of conservatives. What these oppressors carry is political power that they wield with gleeful abandon to stigmatize and “other” others.

In every society, some group will be oppressed. Some beliefs will be deemed anathema. Some actions will be viewed as immoral and stigmatized. There will never be a time or place when “judgmentalism”—that is, making distinctions about the rightness or wrongness of ideas and acts—will cease. Now, as faith in the one true God wanes in America, increasing numbers of people walk in the counsel of the wicked, stand in the way of sinners, and sit in the seat of scoffers.

Let’s see how Hallmark fares in the next year or so with only the “LGBT” crowd and its allies to support it. Oh wait, Hallmark is going to start offering family-friendly homosexual fare (now there’s an oxymoron if ever I heard one). With assistance from the “LGBT” division of Hallmark Cards, the Hallmark Channel shouldn’t find such brown-nosing too difficult.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Hallmark-Channel-Lesbians.mp3

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File this story in your now-bulging “Don’t Say You Weren’t Warned” folder.

Just three weeks ago, on September 19, 2019, the U.S. House Ways and Means Oversight subcommittee—chaired by John Lewis (D-GA) and composed of 7 Democrats and 4 Republicans—held a hearing portentously titled, “HOW THE TAX CODE SUBSIDIZES HATE.” Since conservative beliefs on sexuality are deemed “hateful” by regressives, such a subcommittee hearing should raise the alarm antennas of conservatives and libertarians concerned about assaults on the First Amendment by “progressive” thought police who roam the halls of Congress and the nooks, crannies, and interstices of social media.

What should also trouble them is that 3 of the 7 Democrats specifically mentioned or alluded to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as their source for identifying “hate groups.” (Full, shameless, and cheerful disclosure: the Illinois Family Institute (IFI) has been erroneously listed on the scandal-pocked SPLC’s “hate groups” list since shortly after I began writing for IFI in 2008.) Less than two hours after the beginning of the hearing, the Oversight subcommittee tweeted this:

“[H]omosexuality is a poor and dangerous choice, and has been proven to lead to a litany of health hazards to not only the individuals but also society as a whole,” The American Family Association, Tax Exempt Hate Group.

The first of the five witnesses to testify was busy-beaver homosexual activist Brandon Wolf, a “nationally-recognized advocate for LGBTQ issues” and  “Central Florida Development Officer and Media Relations Manager” for Equality Florida who survived the horrific Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida and said this:

[I]f you are not using everything at your disposal to snuff hate out, then you’re simply not doing enough. The time is now for us to fight harder, lead more courageously, and use everything we have to put an end to this cancer that is ravaging our communities…. Rather than use every tool at our disposal to combat hatred, we have chosen to subsidize it, embolden it…. Inaction in the face of hatred has consequences, and it’s high time that this Congress do something to protect those of us in the line of fire.

Wolf was urging Congress to use the IRS as a weapon to mow down moral views about homosexuality he hates and was doing so by deceitfully exploiting a tragedy that evidence suggests had nothing to do with “anti-gay” sentiment.

Journalist, constitutional lawyer, and (homosexual) co-founder of The Intercept Glenn Greenwald and co-author Murtaza Hussain published an article 18 months ago examining in detail the evidence for Pulse nightclub shooter Omar Mateen’s motives:

Mateen went to Pulse only after having scouted other venues that night that were wholly unrelated to the LGBT community, only to find that they were too defended by armed guards and police, and ultimately chose Pulse only after a generic Google search for “Orlando nightclubs” — not “gay clubs” — produced Pulse as the first search result.

Several journalists closely covering the Mateen investigation have, for some time now, noted the complete absence of any evidence suggesting that Mateen knew that Pulse was a gay club or that targeting the LGBT community was part of his motive. 

…

By repeatedly emphasizing this anti-gay motive, U.S. media reports had the effect, if not the intent, of obscuring what appears to have been Mateen’s overriding, arguably exclusive motive: a desire for retribution and deterrence toward U.S. violence in Muslim countries.

…

Despite this mountain of evidence that strongly negates the original media-disseminated themes about Mateen’s life and his likely motive in targeting Pulse, the early myths remain lodged in the public mind and even in contemporary news reports. In part that’s because much of the evidence has remained under seal, in part because subsequent media debunking received a tiny fraction of the attention of the early, aggressively hyped inflammatory theories, and in part because there has been no political advantage to challenging the politically moving and useful narrative that the attack on Pulse was a hate crime against gay people.

Does anyone really believe full-time homosexual activist Wolf is unaware of this evidence?

Fortunately, one of the Republican members present at the hearing was Illinois’ own Darin Lahood (R-Peoria) who challenged references to the anti-Christian hate group, the SPLC:

[T]he IRS should not be used as a political tool to discriminate against organizations that differ in viewpoints…. We cannot use political disagreement as a metric to define hate speech or a hate group. This type of labeling can and has led to violent acts. I know my colleague just referenced the Southern Poverty Law Center. In 2012, an armed man named Floyd Lee Corkins walked into the Family Research Council Washington headquarters with the intent to shoot and kill as many of its employees as possible. He was apprehended, but not before wounding the non-profit’s business manager. Mr. Corkins later told the FBI that he had seen the nonprofit group listed as an anti-gay hate group on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s website.

Also testifying was UCLA law professor, the libertarian-esque Eugene Volokh who argued that with only very narrow exceptions, all speech is protected by the First Amendment:

The Supreme Court has repeatedly made clear that tax exemptions can’t be denied based on the viewpoint that a group communicates…. The Court has also made equally clear that excluding speech that manifests or promotes “hate” is forbidden viewpoint discrimination…. The law may treat groups differently based on their actions, but not based on the views they express…. Groups may be denied tax exemptions for deliberately engaging in speech that falls within one of the few narrow exceptions to the First Amendment, such as true threats of criminal attack, or incitement intended to and likely to cause imminent criminal conduct. But “hate speech” writ large doesn’t fall within any such exceptions.

Our First Amendment rights will not long stand against the sexual appetites of the deviant who run amok among us. Neither our constitutionally protected religious free exercise rights, nor our speech rights, nor our assembly rights will be protected now that they have been subordinated to subjective and disordered sexual desires. And neither will our intrinsic privacy rights remain protected. Cultural critics warned about the dangers posed to this once-great Republic by 1. allowing the terms “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” to Guinea-worm their way into anti-discrimination policies and laws, and 2. the Obergefelle U.S. Supreme Court decision, which has been interpreted as legalizing same-sex marriage everywhere in the United States. But conservatives largely dismissed such warnings out of either a failure to think deeply about the implications of these changes or cowardice or both.

Leftists are turning—not turning right—turning against the U.S. Constitution, and slowly they’re coming, step by step, straight for the First Amendment.

Take ACTION: Click HERE to send a message to your U.S. Representative to ask him/her to reject the SPLC’s definition of “hate groups,” which includes conservative and faith-based groups, such as IFI and AFA. Traditional Judeo-Christian teaching about human sexuality is neither “hateful” nor “vile.” Ask them to stand up for the First Amendment and protect religious liberty and speech rights by rejecting this effort to penalize so-called “hate” speech.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Slowly-Leftists-Turn-Step-By-Step.mp3

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The hate business may not be what it used to be – at least on the government level.

The Defense Department has become the latest federal agency to sever ties with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), an Alabama-based, hard-left group whose “hate map” is being used against Christian groups.

Well, bully for the Pentagon for showing that bully to the door.

The DOD’s pullback from the SPLC was reported by the Daily Caller, which said that a Justice Department attorney stated in an email that the DOD “removed any and all references to the SPLC in training materials used by the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute (DEOMI).”

In 2014, the FBI dropped the SPLC from its resources page after congressional staff, acting on behalf of the Family Research Council (FRC) and other Christian groups on the “hate map,” met with FBI officials to discuss their concerns, according to the Daily Caller.

Once hailed for tracking the Ku Klux Klan and other extremists, the SPLC has in recent years been wielded against mainstream Christian organizations over their defense of Biblical sexual morality and marriage.

If you say out loud that men are different from women, you just took a big step toward the “hate map.”  If you say that marriage necessarily involves both sexes, bingo.  And if you say that it’s not loving to steer boys into identifying as girls, you might earn an SPLC mention alongside skinheads and Neo-Nazis.

The SPLC also targets those who oppose illegal immigration and those who believe Islamic expansionism is a threat to freedom.  All in all, the SPLC might want to consider changing its name to Hate, Inc.

In 2015, the SPLC placed presidential candidate Ben Carson, who now heads the Department of Housing and Urban Development, on an “extremist” hate watch list.  After taking considerable flak, the SPLC removed the citation and apologized to Dr. Carson.

But this guilt-by-association ploy is having a huge effect in Silicon Valley, where cyber giants who fancy themselves do-gooders look to the SPLC for guidance.

“Right now, [the SPLC is] cutting off hate groups from sources of financing by pushing digital companies like Amazon not to allow hate groups to use their services,” said SPLC’s founder, direct-mail wizard Morris Dees.

Google, Facebook and Twitter are under congressional scrutiny for allegedly “shadow banning” conservative and religious postings.

“The most dangerous aspect of this high-tech offensive on pro-faith groups and individuals is buried deep in the algorithms of these gatekeepers for the new economy,” said Mat Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel.

Google now supports a “hate news” database that links to articles referencing Liberty Counsel and other Christian groups on the SPLC “hate” list.  The SPLC’s smears have led Amazon Smile, a charity donation program run by Jeff Bezos’ Amazon company, to ban pro-family Christian groups.

Last year, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced a $1 million Apple donation to the SPLC and added a portal so iTunes buyers could donate directly. Big Tech, meet Big Hate.

The SPLC’s perfidy has led to “hate” labels on Christian groups listed in GuideStar, the charity group database, which removed some labels after a public outcry.  Discover/Diners Club is now blocking transactions with some pro-family groups, according to Liberty Counsel’s Mat Staver.

Making false accusations of hate is profoundly hateful, but it’s also lucrative. The SPLC, which has raised millions since its 1971 founding, has fattened its endowment to more than $477 million, according to its latest Form 990.

In August 2017, D. James Kennedy Ministries, for which I have written several books, finally had had enough and filed a defamation lawsuit against the SPLC in Alabama and also sued GuideStar and Amazon.com, Inc.  The ministry withdrew the GuideStar suit but continued the other litigation.  Liberty Counsel also sued GuideStar, but that suit was thrown out last January by U.S. District Judge Raymond Jackson, a Bill Clinton appointee.

In August 2012, Leo Johnson, the building manager at FRC headquarters in Washington, D.C., was shot while preventing an attempted mass murder by a man who said he was inspired by FRC’s presence on the SPLC’s “hate map.”

The shooter, Floyd Lee Corkins II, planned to kill as many people as possible and jam Chick-fil-A sandwiches into their faces to protest Chick-fil-A’s and FRC’s support for natural marriage.  He was sentenced to 25 years in prison in September 2013 for committing an act of terrorism while armed and other offenses.

Apparently, the SPLC did not find this compelling enough to remove FRC from its “hate map,” where it remained until very recently.  However, FRC – along with D. James Kennedy Ministries, the American Family Association, Alliance Defending Freedom, the Ruth Institute, the American College of Pediatricians and many other reputable Christian groups, along with the Jewish-led parents group MassResistance – is still listed on the SPLC’s “Hate Watch” page.

For pro-family activists, it’s become a badge of honor.

SPLC, once a valued organization fighting for civil rights of minorities, refocused some time ago. Part of that “refocusing” resulted in the group’s publication of a “hate map” several years ago. James Wright, head of D. James Kennedy Ministries, is very familiar with the hate map.

“Initially it was related to the question of marriage and the gay agenda,” he shares. “[But] these days if you’re on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s hate map, it might be anything from your stand on immigration, to radical Islam, to the sanctity of human life, to marriage, to whatever.”

GuideStar has re-published the hate map and Amazon’s charitable contributions don’t go to those groups listed thereon. That includes D. James Kennedy Ministries, which has filed suit in Alabama federal court alleging discrimination and libel against all three organizations.

Wright argues that SPLC, GuideStar, and Amazon have labeled his organization and many others as hate groups for one simple reason: “To try to silence us,” he says. “They don’t want to deal with us on the issues. They want to silence us and make us a marginal voice in the culture.”

He goes on to say “their definition of hate is both morally and intellectually dishonest, unjustifiable” – and that the only way to deal with it is to have the three groups prove their definition of hate before a jury of peers. Thus, the lawsuit.

Apple’s profits going to the SPLC

A spokesman for another group on the “hate map” says it’s dangerous when people are so blinded by their ideology that they finance organizations such as the SPLC. That comment comes in the wake of Apple Corporation CEO Tim Cook announcing his company is donating $1 million to the SPLC and the Anti-Defamation League.

Abraham Hamilton III, general counsel and policy analyst for the American Family Association, responds to the donation.

Hamilton offers a solution to deal with Apple’s announced plan to use profits from the sales of its products to support organizations like the SPLC – organizations he says “encourage hate” and are “radically, ideologically driven” and pro-abortion.

“[When] you see this happening, the best way to respond is to vote with your pocketbook,” he tells OneNewsNow.

In other words, consumers will decide whether Apple’s move is good for public relations.

I was hoping not to step into the sticky wicket that the Charlottesville protest, counter-protest, and at

tack created. All discussions of fault or causation carry the risk of being labeled a bigot or hater. But, for a number of reasons, fearful silence is not a justifiable response.

Southern Poverty Law Center 

One of those reasons is that the Plainfield Patch published an article titled “Illinois Hate Groups: Map Shows Active Racist Organizations” in which the Patch cites the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to alert Illinoisans to the presence of “32 hate” groups in Illinois, including the Illinois Family Institute.

It is both morally indefensible and intellectually dishonest of the ethically impoverished Southern Poverty Law Center to include the Illinois Family Institute (IFI) on its list of “hate” groups, alongside repugnant white supremacist groups/white separatists/white nationalists.

IFI is included on this list because we espouse theologically orthodox views of homosexuality, marriage, and the intrinsic and profound meaning of objective, immutable biological sex—views that are held by the Catholic Church, a dozen Protestant denominations, the Mormon Church, Seventh Day Adventism, many non-denominational churches, 2,000 years of church history, the Bible, and Orthodox Judaism.

Other Christian organizations included on the SPLC “hate” groups list are the American Family Association, Family Research Council, Alliance Defending Freedom, Liberty Counsel, and the Ruth Institute.

The goal of the SPLC’s malignant slander is to stigmatize and marginalize any group that defends marriage and sexual morality. Is the Plainfield Patch absolved of all moral culpability for smearing IFI because technically all it did was cite the anti-Christian hate group known euphemistically as the SPLC?

To be clear, the Illinois Family Institute and its sister organization Illinois Family Action—both of which have blacks serving on our boards–unequivocally denounce racism and hatred directed at any persons.

White Separatism and racism

Every decent person and certainly every Christian should denounce the vile racist beliefs of white separatists/white supremacists. We should condemn the actions of the domestic terrorist who launched his car into a crowd to mow down those whose beliefs he rejected. His actions (and the beliefs that impelled them) are as repugnant as those that led to lynchings, Jim Crow laws, and the Holocaust.

Christians must speak truth even when doing so is difficult. In a letter to his son who has embraced the ugly and false beliefs of what has come to be called the “alt-right,” a father reveals what commitment to truth may entail:

On Friday night, my son traveled to Charlottesville, Va., and was interviewed by a national news outlet while marching with reported white nationalists, who allegedly went on to kill a person.

I, along with all of his siblings and his entire family, wish to loudly repudiate my son’s vile, hateful and racist rhetoric and actions. We do not know specifically where he learned these beliefs. He did not learn them at home.

I have shared my home and hearth with friends and acquaintances of every race, gender and creed. I have taught all of my children that all men and women are created equal. That we must love each other all the same.

Evidently Peter has chosen to unlearn these lessons, much to my and his family’s heartbreak and distress. We have been silent up until now, but now we see that this was a mistake. It was the silence of good people that allowed the Nazis to flourish the first time around, and it is the silence of good people that is allowing them to flourish now.

Peter Tefft, my son, is not welcome at our family gatherings any longer. I pray my prodigal son will renounce his hateful beliefs and return home. Then and only then will I lay out the feast.

He once joked, “The thing about us fascists is, it’s not that we don’t believe in freedom of speech. You can say whatever you want. We’ll just throw you in an oven.”

Peter, you will have to shovel our bodies into the oven, too. Please son, renounce the hate, accept and love all.

The proper response to racial hatred is not the curtailment of speech rights, the destruction of property, or violent vigilantism. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Mr. Tefft understood what antifa anarchists clearly do not.

Antifa’s anarchism

Peter Beinart, associate professor of journalism and political science at the City University of New York, writes about the history and current incarnation of the troubling antifa movement in an article in the Atlantic titled “The Rise of the Violent Left”:

Since antifa is heavily composed of anarchists, its activists place little faith in the state, which they consider complicit in fascism and racism. They prefer direct action: They pressure venues to deny white supremacists space to meet. They pressure employers to fire them and landlords to evict them. And when people they deem racists and fascists manage to assemble, antifa’s partisans try to break up their gatherings, including by force.

Such tactics have elicited substantial support from the mainstream left.

…

The violence is not directed only at avowed racists like [Richard] Spencer: In June of last year, demonstrators—at least some of whom were associated with antifa—punched and threw eggs at people exiting a Trump rally in San Jose, California. An article in It’s Going Down [an online website for “anarchists” and “autonomous anti-capitalists”] celebrated the “righteous beatings.”

…

As members of a largely anarchist movement, antifascists don’t want the government to stop white supremacists from gathering. They want to do so themselves, rendering the government impotent. 

…

Antifa believes it is pursuing the opposite of authoritarianism. Many of its activists oppose the very notion of a centralized state. But in the name of protecting the vulnerable, antifascists have granted themselves the authority to decide which Americans may publicly assemble and which may not. That authority rests on no democratic foundation. Unlike the politicians they revile, the men and women of antifa cannot be voted out of office. Generally, they don’t even disclose their names.

…

The people preventing Republicans from safely assembling on the streets of Portland may consider themselves fierce opponents of the authoritarianism growing on the American right. In truth, however, they are its unlikeliest allies.

The causes of both racial hatred and anarchism are numerous and complex. As Americans grapple with understanding them and finding solutions, I hope and pray they will think deeply about the causative roles these three phenomena play in rendering young people—particularly young men—vulnerable to racist or anarchistic ideologies:

• the absence of faith in the one true God

• the break-up of nuclear families and the concomitant absence of fathers

• the dissemination in government schools of Critical Theory, which teaches students that whites are oppressors based on nothing other than their skin color

Pastor and theologian John Piper reminds Christians that what unites humans—what humans of all races and ethnicities share in common—is far greater, more profound, and more substantive than the things that divide us:

In determining the significance of who you are, being a person in the image of God compares to ethnic distinctives the way the noonday sun compares to a candlestick. In other words, finding your main identity in whiteness or blackness or any other ethnic color or trait is like boasting that you carry a candle to light the cloudless noonday sky. Candles have their place. But not to light the day. So color and ethnicity have their place, but not as the main glory and wonder of our identity as human beings. The primary glory of who we are is what unites us in our God-like humanity, not what differentiates us in our ethnicity.

Recovering and passing on to our children an understanding of the political principles on which the greatest country in the history of the world was founded is essential to fostering unity amid diversity. So too is faith in God.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
(William Butler Yeats)

A bold voice for pro-family values in Illinois!

Click HERE to learn about supporting IFI on a monthly basis.

This cannot be good for free speech and the open exchange of ideas. Not for Christians and conservatives anyway.

Twitter announced on Wednesday that it has assembled a new “Twitter Trust & Safety Council” to “ensure that people feel safe expressing themselves on Twitter.”

Who’s for safety?

Yay safety!

Still, we need only look to the so-called “safe space” craze on America’s college campuses to gain a glimpse into what Twitter undoubtedly means here. Understand that, for the left, the word “safe” has nothing to do with, well, safety, and everything to do with censorship.

Let’s define the terms:

Safe Space: noun, 1. progressive circle of self-entitled, everyone-gets-a-trophy basement-dwellers sheltered from critical thinking, differing opinions, reality and oxygen.

With its new initiative, Twitter says it seeks to “strike the right balance between fighting abuse and speaking truth to power.”

What, exactly, constitutes “abuse,” “truth” and “power” remains to be seen, but, based on Twitter’s long history of blacklisting and “unverifying” conservatives from its rolls, I think we all know who gets shafted on this.

“To ensure people can continue to express themselves freely and safely on Twitter, we must provide more tools and policies,” the company claims. “Twitter does not tolerate behavior intended to harass, intimidate, or use fear to silence another user’s voice.”

Color me über-skeptical, but as Daniel Payne observes over at The Federalist, “Twitter already allows its users to either mute or block anyone who is being bothersome or threatening. There is no practical necessity for a ‘council’ to make people feel ‘safe’ on Twitter. Blocking is an effective tool for anyone who needs it. You can always report to the Twitter staff the rare troll who just won’t give up.

“The seemingly superfluous formation of a ‘Trust and Safety Council,’ then, suggests a kind of procedural overhaul of Twitter’s internal speech policy,” concludes Payne.

I agree.

Indeed, to the fragile liberal mind, any disagreement with its rigid, and decidedly one-sided, brand of “tolerance” and “diversity” constitutes “behavior intended to harass” or “intimidate.” To those who cannot win an argument on the merits, the path of least resistance is to silence all dissent.

Yet, if there was any question as to whether Twitter will be adopting the above-referenced definition of “safe space” in its effort to make tweeters “feel safe,” that question is immediately resolved by virtue of whom it has deputized. While there are a handful of legitimate, left-of-center anti-bullying organizations on the “council,” the list is likewise comprised up a rag-tag gaggle of fringe “progressive” groups like Feminist Frequency and GLAAD (formerly the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation).

Conspicuously absent is even one conservative or Christian organization.

So, what will GLAAD and the rest of the “Tweet Police” be doing? It’s hard to say for sure since Twitter won’t, but, considering what GLAAD already does, we can venture a fair guess.

GLAAD is an extremist homosexual censorship group that, for its defamatory antics, was certified last year by the well-respected American Family Association as an “openly bigoted anti-Christian organization.” GLAAD’s primary purpose is to strong-arm the entertainment industry and news media into presenting unrealistically favorable portrayals of the homosexual and gender-confused lifestyles, while at once censoring positive portrayals of natural marriage and the natural family, and silencing those who hold biblical values relative to marriage and human sexuality.

One of GLAAD’s most troubling censorship efforts was its Orwellian “Commentator Accountability Project.” This was a desperate effort to “suppress the biblical worldview from media.” Various homosexual activists were conscripted to contact, badger and otherwise intimidate media outlets, such as CNN, Fox News, the New York Times, et al., into blacklisting leading Christian cultural analysts (yours truly included) from providing commentary and political analysis over the airwaves and in print.

While the smear campaign ultimately failed, it did betray, for all the world to see, GLAAD’s overt designs on anti-conservative, anti-Christian censorship. And now it has its grubby little rainbow-hued fingerprints all over one of the world’s largest and most popular social networking sites.

Enjoy your Twitter free speech while you can, conservative Christians. Your tweets are birds on a wire, and GLAAD’s got the pellet gun.

AFA and other pro-family groups have sent a letter to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, urging the Department of Defense to stop using the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as a resource.

SPLC materials are specifically anti-Christian and label many faith-based organizations like American Family Association, Illinois Family Institute and Family Research Council as “hate groups” because of our strong stand defending traditional marriage laws and resisting the aggressive, radical homosexual agenda.

The Department of Defense should stop using SPLC’s fabrications immediately. Add your voice to ours!

The American Family Association has been singled out as a “hate group” in briefings at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, and Fort Hood, Texas by military trainers relying on false SPLC materials.

In one presentation, the photo of Fred Phelps of “God hates fags” fame was disgustingly displayed on a screen with AFA’s logo. Not only did trainers lie by claiming there was an association between AFA and Phelps, they warned our men and women in training that to have any dealings with AFA, including making donations, would be a breach of conduct.

The SPLC has no credibility among people who value truth, and the military should not be using it as a source for training materials for service members.

Take ACTION:  Click HERE to join the coalition of conservative organizations in sending your copy of the letter we wrote to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel urging the Department of Defense to stop using the Southern Poverty Law Center as a resource.  

 Read more:  What is Wrong with the Southern Poverty Law Center? by IFI’s Laurie Higgins

Some pro-family organizations are rankled at the latest attempt by a liberal media outlet to co-opt two of America’s most beloved children’s pop culture icons on behalf of the pro-homosexual movement.

The Muppets Bert and Ernie, perhaps the most recognized characters of the popular U.S. children’s television program Sesame Street, have been used to commemorate last week’s landmark Supreme Court rulings on same-sex “marriage.” The latest issue of The New Yorker magazine shows the duo cuddling on their sofa as they watch a television featuring members of the United States Supreme Court.

The illustration, titled “Moment of Joy,” suggests the two characters were joyfully celebrating the recent rulings overturning the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and California’s Proposition 8 ban on same-sex marriage.

Dan Gainor, vice president of business and culture for the Media Research Center, believes children are the ultimate losers.

“What happened to the idea that we could have the innocence of youth?” asks Gainor. “Where children are not abused this way? Where the characters they grow up with and learn from are made gay?”

Gainor cites the move to reverse the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, a “Was Jesus Gay” article in the Huffington Post, and now the cover of The New Yorker magazine as examples of a major propaganda initiative to convince the world that a large number of the world’s population is “gay.”

“Literally, from pre-K all the way up to senior citizens, they use TV, they use radio, they use movies, they use news and entertainment and magazines,” says Gainor. “The whole goal is [to proclaim] that all male or all female friendships … must be gay. Their opinion is basically everybody must be gay. No, that’s actually not the case.”

Gainor is not alone in his criticism.

“It’s beneath contempt for a magazine of The New Yorker‘s stature to use Bert and Ernie to celebrate behavior which is immoral, unnatural and unhealthy,” says Tim Wildmon, president of the American Family Association (AFA). “The artist is just dead wrong. This is a tragic day for kids who will wind up in same-sex households.”

Wildmon notes a study by University of Texas researcher Mark Regnerus that concluded children raised in same-sex environments fared worse in 77 out of 80 outcomes when compared to children raised in intact homes by a mother and a father.

“The Bible has had it right from the beginning: marriage is between a man and a woman, and it’s the optimal nurturing environment for children. The New Yorker ought to be ashamed of itself,” concludes Wildmon.

On Friday, columnist Bryan Fischer accused the magazine of promoting “child endangerment” and “child abuse” by using the images of Bert and Ernie. Fischer also cited the findings of Mark Regnerus.

‘Great for our kids’?

The Ernie and Bert characters have lived together for several years in an apartment in the basement of 123 Sesame Street. Although they sleep in separate beds, they share a bedroom, which has led some to speculate the characters portray a homosexual relationship.

In 2011, after an online petition asking for Sesame Street to have Bert and Ernie “wed” went viral, the shows producers’ refuted that claim. That same petition also asked producers to add a transgender character.

“Bert and Ernie are best friends. They were created to teach preschoolers that people can be good friends with those who are very different from themselves,” Sesame Workshop said in a statement at the time. “Even though they are identified as male characters and possess many human traits and characteristics (as most Sesame Street Muppets do), they remain puppets, and do not have a sexual orientation.”

Jack Hunter, the artist who designed the cover and first posted his image on a Tumblr account, said: “It’s amazing to witness how attitudes on gay rights have evolved in my lifetime. This is great for our kids, a moment we can all celebrate.”

Originally posted at OneNewsNow.com.

It’s probably too much to hope for, but perhaps the day of reckoning for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has come. Perhaps the shooting last week at the Family Research Council headquarters in Washington D.C. will bring scrutiny to and condemnation of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s pernicious “hate group” list on which the Family Research Council (FRC), American Family Association (AFA), and we, the Illinois Family Institute (IFI), are included.

All three organizations are included on the SPLC’s ever-expanding list of hate groups that also includes “neo-Nazi” groups, ”racist skinhead” groups, and the Ku Klux Klan. FRC, AFA, and IFI are listed as “anti-gay hate groups.”

News reports revealed that shortly after the FRC shooting, the FBI contacted the Traditional Values Coalition, another conservative Christian organization on the SPLC’s “anti-gay hate group” list to notify them that the shooter, Floyd Corkins, had its address in his backpack. The Traditional Values Coalition is so small that very few conservatives have even heard of it, so where might Corkins have learned about  it? Hmmmm, let’s see… Could it be from the SPLC’s hate group list?

In an interview following the shooting, FRC President Tony Perkins said, “I believe the Southern Poverty Law Center should be held accountable for their reckless use of terminology.” While Mark Potok, editor-in-chief of the SPLC’s ironically named “Intelligence Report” and “Hatewatch” blog continues to spew defamatory lies, he takes umbrage at this criticism of the SPLC’s ethics.

Countless liberal bloggers, political pundits, and the mainstream press repeat the SPLC’s specious designation of conservative Christian groups as “hate groups.” But one wonders how many of those who repeat the SPLC’s fallacious claims bother to read the criteria that the SPLC uses to determine who goes on its “hate group” list. Do any journalists, law enforcement agencies, or gullible acolytes of the SPLC bother to analyze the soundness of the evidence the SPLC provides for the inclusion of groups on their “hate group” list?

And do disciples of the SPLC know that it included groups on its “anti-gay hate group” list prior to the establishment and publication of any criteria to determine which groups would go on it?

SPLC’s “hate group” criteria center on social science research and policy speculation with which the SPLC disagrees.

The SPLC has been harshly criticized for its anti-religious bias, even—irony of ironies—its hatred of orthodox Christians. In an obvious attempt to distract attention from the truth of that criticism, Potok and his accomplices Heidi Beirich, Evelyn Schlatter, and Robert Steinback manufactured a set of criteria in 2010 that would enable them to include groups like the FRC, AFA, and IFI on their “anti-gay hate group” list. They apparently counted on Americans not noticing that their criteria bear no resemblance to actual hatred: no expressions of hate, no calls for violence, no claims that those who identify as homosexual are less valuable as human beings.

What the SPLC has done is create an elastic definition of hatred that centers on social science research,  facts, or propositions that the SPLC doesn’t like.

One criterion that the SPLC uses to establish “hate group” status is whether an organization makes any predictions that the SPLC doesn’t like about the potential legal consequences of law or policy related to homosexuality.

The SPLC claims that groups warrant inclusion on its “hate group” list if they propagate “known falsehoods” about homosexuality. I’m not sure if Potok and his compeers actually understand what a “known falsehood” (also called a lie) is. A known falsehood is a statement that is objectively, provably false and is known to be false when made.

The SPLC has said, for example, that if an organization argues that hate crime legislation may result in the jailing of pastors who condemn volitional homosexual acts as sinful, the organization is guilty of “anti-gay” hatred and will be included on the SPLC’s “hate group” list.

And any organization that argues that allowing homosexuals to serve openly in the military will damage the military in some way merits inclusion on its “anti-gay hate group” list.

How can Potok sensibly claim that speculating that hate crimes legislation may lead to the jailing of pastors who condemn homosexuality is a known falsehood? It is a prediction of possible future events that may result from the logical working out of a law. This prediction may not come to fruition, but at this point it cannot reasonably be deemed a “known falsehood.”

And how can a prediction about the effects of allowing homosexuals to serve openly in the military be a known falsehood. Certainly, there are differences of opinion on the effects of the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, but liberal speculation that such a change will not damage the military is not a known truth.

Another criterion used by the SPLC to determine whether an organization is a “hate group” is whether the organization cites any social science research that the SPLC doesn’t like.

According to the SPLC, if an organization says that “gays are more prone to mental illness and to abuse drugs and alcohol,” it goes on the SPLC’s hate groups list. I’m sure this is not news to Potok, but there is a lot of research showing just that.

The SPLC engages in some tricksy rhetoric to defend this intellectually and ethically bankrupt criterion. Schlatter and Steinback argue that mental health organizations no longer consider homosexuality a mental disorder, which is true, but has no relevance to the fact—which even the SPLC concedes—that homosexuals experience much higher rates of mental illness and drug and alcohol abuse.

What really sticks in the craw of the SPLC is that conservative organizations don’t agree with the unproven speculation by the  SPLC and some social scientists that the reasons for the increased incidence of mental disorders and drug use are social stigma and “discrimination.”

The SPLC deems hateful the claim that same-sex parents harm children. Of course, Potok and his minions don’t feel any obligation to define harm and apparently reject a whole body of social science research that claims that children fare best when raised by a mother and father in an intact family. Even President Obama in his Mother’s Day and Father’s Day proclamations argued that both are essential to the welfare of children.

While homosexual activists revel in even the most poorly constructed social science research if it reinforces their presuppositions, they reject better constructed studies that undermine them. The truth is that if organizations don’t accept the ever-fluid, controvertible, and highly politicized social science research that the SPLC favors, they go on the “hate group” list.

“Hate group” designation relies on the redefinition of terms

In addition to marshaling only that social science research that fits their subversive sexual worldview, the SPLC does what virtually every homosexuality-affirming organization does, which is redefine terms to silence dissent and enable them to promote fallacious charges of hate with carefree abandon.

Among the many terms that homosexuality activist organizations like the SPLC have redefined are “hatred,” “tolerance,” “acceptance,” “bias,” “discrimination,” and “safety.” What the new definitions share in common is their utility in humiliating, intimidating, and silencing those who believe that same-sex attraction is disordered, that homosexual acts are immoral, and that  marriage is the inherently procreative union between one man and one woman.

The SPLC is continually telling people who identify as homosexual that those who believe homosexual acts are immoral hate them. The tragic effect of propagating that ugly lie is not only that it may lead unstable people to commit acts of violence. The truly tragic effect is that it undermines the potential for relationships between people who hold diverse moral views and effaces the potential for dialogue.

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When it comes to supporting God’s design for marriage, Illinois Family Institute isn’t “chicken,” and neither is Chick-fil-A president Dan Cathy.  Christian-owned Chick-fil-A is under attack because Mr. Cathy has publicly affirmed his belief in the biblical definition of marriage. 

As a result, homosexual groups have launched un-relenting and vicious public attacks against Chick-fil-A. Here in Illinois, Equality Illinois, a pro-LGBT activist group, is calling for a “Kiss-In” this Friday, August 3rd.  According to news reports, Equality Illinois says, “LGBT supporters will show their disdain for Chick-Fil-A’s policies with public displays of affection in front of their restaurants.”  And in the process they will once again be demonstrating just how intolerant, insensitive and disrespectful the Left is in pushing its “anything goes” agenda.  

Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day is being promoted by Gov. Mike Huckabee, Senator Rick Santorum, Gov. Sarah Palin, American Family Association, Family Research Council, WallBuilders and Illinois Family Institute.  This is a great way of showing our support for a company whose owners believe in marriage as one man and one woman.

IFI encourages you to patronize a local Chick-fil-A restaurant on August 1st,  if you are able.  If you cannot make it this Wednesday, please visit one sometime this week. For a list of Chick-fil-A locations in the state of Illinois, click HERE.

And when you do, please take a moment to thank the staff and management by letting them know you appreciate the company’s Christian values.