“If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you” (John 15:18-19).

In the wake of the Charlottesville melee, the mainstream press is citing the disreputable Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and its “hate” groups list ad nauseum with nary a peep about the repeated criticism of the SPLC as a bastion of anti-Christian bigotry.

The Illinois Family Institute (IFI) is included on the “hate” groups list alongside white supremacist and white separatist groups for no reason other than our biblical view of marriage as a sexually differentiated union and our biblical views of sexual morality—views that are shared by the Roman Catholic Church, many Protestant denominations, many non-denominational churches, Orthodox Judaism, 2,000 years of church history, and the Bible.

It’s not just IFI that finds the SPLC and its leaders unethical. The avaricious founder of the SPLC, Morris Dees, and the dishonest editor-in-chief of the “Intelligence Report” which is responsible for the corrupt “hate” groups list, Mark Potok, have come under sustained criticism from many people for many years. (Click here, here, and here  to read more.)

Several months ago, one such critic, Real Clear Politics writer Carl Cannon, wrote an exposé of the SPLC, to whom Cannon attributes blame for the anti-free-speech assault on political scientist Charles Murray at radical Middlebury College in Vermont.

Civil rights attorney Dees co-founded the lucrative non-profit SPLC in 1971, ostensibly to combat the racism endemic to the South, and on the way, he’s made a boatload of money that has enabled him to live the luxurious lifestyle to which he and his five serial wives had become accustomed. His clients? Well, they didn’t fare quite as well financially.

Cannon explains that when the Ku Klux Klan’s power waned and racism diminished, the SPLC had to find new ways “to frighten people into still donating.” He says that “Scaring the bejesus out of people requires new bogeymen, and lots of them.” Further, Cannon claims that “mainstream conservative groups” are among the bogeymen.

Cannon reports that the “most scathing assessments of Dees and his group have always come from the left” like “Stephen B. Bright, a Yale law professor and president of the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights,” who describes Dees as a “con man” and a “fraud.”

Even the far-Left magazine The Nation indicts Dees as “the archsalesman of hatemongering,” accusing him of stuffing “mailbags…with his fundraising letters, scaring dollars out of the pockets of trembling liberals aghast at his lurid depictions of a hate-sodden America in dire need of legal confrontation by the SPLC…. Dees and his hate-seekers scour the landscape for hate…it’s their staple.”

While useful idiots in the mainstream press disseminate the SPLC’s propaganda, thus smearing Christian organizations and lining the pockets of Dees, the FBI has stopped using the SPLC as a resource.

The SPLC has perfected the tactics espoused by homosexuals Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen who in 1989 wrote what they deemed a “gay manifesto for the 1990’s” titled After the Ball, in which they urged “progressives” to utilize the mainstream media in a campaign to eradicate conservative moral beliefs—what they call “homohatred”—or “silence” the expression of such beliefs in public:

[L]ink homohating bigotry with all sorts of attributes the bigot would be ashamed to possess and with social consequences he would find unpleasant and scary…. Gays must launch a large-scale campaign…to reach straights through mainstream media. We’re talking about propaganda…. Gays must be portrayed as victims in need of protection…. Make victimizers look bad…. The public should be shown images of ranting homohaters whose associated traits and attitudes appall and anger Middle America. The images might include: Klansmen… Hysterical backwoods preachers… Menacing punks, thugs, and convicts who speak coolly about the “fags” they… would like to bash… [or] A tour of Nazi concentration camps where homosexuals were tortured and gassed.

The SPLC employs all of these propagandistic tactics to stigmatize and marginalize Christian organizations like the Family Research Council, the American Family Association, Liberty Counsel, and the Illinois Family Institute for our beliefs about sexuality and marriage that derive from Scripture and for our willingness to express them publicly.

These are a few of the organizations that have not fallen prey to ravenous wolves or been taken “captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ” (Colossians 2:8).

For their faithfulness, Christ-followers will be hated, but enduring such trials brings blessings:

“Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” (Matthew 5:11-12).

The cost of discipleship has been minimal in America for over two hundred years, but the cost is rising due to the unholy efforts of “LGBTQQAP” activists.

While Jesus says, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me,” many Christians—entire denominations—are choosing instead friendship with the world, ignoring the words of James:

“Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore, whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.” (James 4:4).

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Many years ago, I witnessed what happens when people who prevent others from speaking are not dealt with promptly.

During a “Firing Line” taping with William F. Buckley at Bard College in New York State on the topic of “Resolved: The ACLU is full of baloney” (the short answer is “yes”), two female activists stood up and started chanting “women of color have no voice.”

The moderator, a well-known liberal (well, okay, it was Michael Kinsley, who did an otherwise fine job), asked them politely to stop so the debate could continue, but the protesters refused.  At this point, he could have motioned to the campus cops to remove them, but instead let them go on ad nauseum.  I leaned over and whispered to then-ACLU President Nadine Strossen, “Nadine, do something. They’re your children.”  I meant her ideological offspring, of course.  And she did try to reason with them, to no avail.

Unlike some recent incidents, the debate finally went on after Mr. Kinsley gave in to the protesters’ tantrum, let them read a list of nonsensical leftwing ultimatums, and Bard’s president agreed to leave the team he was on in the debate.

I’m not sure how much of this made the eventual PBS broadcast, but it showed the folly of giving in to the heckler’s veto.  That’s when, in the name of free speech, someone silences someone else.  Courts have made it clear that the heckler’s veto is not protected speech under the First Amendment, no more than falsely yelling “fire” in a crowded theater.

Since President Trump’s election, the Left has been in full heckler’s veto mode, egged on by the same progressives who cheered the violent Occupy mobs in 2011 and 2012 and the goons disrupting the Trump rallies last year.

[Recently], protesters threated violence against Republican Party participants in the 82^nd Avenue of Roses Parade in Portland, Oregon, and managed to get the event canceled.   An anonymous email promised that “two hundred or more people” would “rush into the parade into the middle and drag and push those people out…. police cannot stop us from shutting down roads so please consider your decision wisely.”

Then, amid threats of violence, conservative author Ann Coulter was forced to cancel her speech at the University of California, Berkeley.  In February, the campus had suffered $100,000 in property damage when black-clad leftist rioters stopped iconoclast Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking.

In March, political scientist Charles Murray was forced to change venues at Middlebury College in Vermont during a mob attack in which a female professor was injured.  Middlebury itself may be failing to teach about constitutional rights, if a letter signed by 450 alumni prior to Murray’s appearance is any indication:  “This is not an issue of freedom of speech.  In this case we find the principle does not apply.”

Well, okay then. Disagree with us and you lose your rights.

In early April, hundreds of activists blocked an auditorium at Claremont McKenna College in California to prevent author Heather MacDonald from speaking.  Ms. MacDonald’s analysis of crime statistics blows away the media narrative about racist cops spun by the Black Lives Matter movement.  No wonder they wanted her silenced.

For the Left, the issues themselves matter less than a show of force.  As author Angelo M. Codevilla has observed, “The point of PC [political correctness] is not and has never been merely about any of the items that it imposes, but about the imposition itself.”

In “State and Revolution” (1918), Vladimir Lenin wrote:

“The replacement of the bourgeois (middle class) by the proletariat state is impossible without a violent revolution … it is still necessary to suppress the bourgeoisie and crush its resistance.”

Even if none of this involves something you hold dear, the mobs will get around to you if you’re out of step.  A byproduct is the chilling effect it has had on discourse in general.

I recall when liberals and conservatives could agree to disagree during, say, a party, and leave as friends, or at least not as enemies.  But when’s the last time you went to an eclectic gathering and heard genuine views exchanged?  Nobody dares anymore.  The Left’s scorched-earth tactics have poisoned the well.

In Massachusetts, an editorial at The Wellesley News on April 12 openly advocated attacking anyone who fails to bow to leftwing orthodoxy.  Their definition of what will not be allowed includes “racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia or any other type of discriminatory speech.  Shutting down rhetoric that undermines the existence and rights of others is not a violation of free speech; it is hate speech.”

The good little Maoists (who are punctuation-challenged) went on to declare, “if people are given the resources to learn and either continue to speak hate speech or refuse to adapt their beliefs, then hostility may be warranted.” Later, they denied that this meant engaging in violence.

Incidentally, Hillary Clinton’s alma mater charges about $63,300 annually for tuition, room and board.  Apparently, that buys the finest brainwashing against the bourgeoisie that a campus can conjure.

This article was originally posted at Townhall.com