Jeff Sessions Calls Out SPLC; Conservative Leaders Optimistic FBI Will Cut Ties
Attorney General Jeff Sessions criticized the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) by name Wednesday as he spoke at the Religious Liberty Summit of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the successful Christian public interest law firm the SPLC designates a “hate group.”
The ADF earned its SPLC “Anti-LGBT Hate Group” designation after a string of Supreme Court victories that enraged the far left, most notably the successful defense of a Christian Colorado baker who refused to adorn a cake with phrases condoning homosexual marriage in this year’s Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission.
His address to the ADF summit included Sessions first public mention of the SPLC since Fox News’s Tucker Carlson revealed the group’s ongoing, but ill-defined, relationship with the FBI last month. Just days after that report, on July 30, the attorney general seemed to make oblique reference to the SPLC as he announced his new DOJ Religious Liberty Task Force. “We have gotten to the point where … one group can actively target religious groups by labeling them a “hate group” on the basis of their sincerely held religious beliefs,” Sessions said.
On Wednesday, Sessions was much more explicit, praising the SPLC for its past work to combat racism in the South while condemning it for abandoning that legacy to attack right-leaning groups with which it disagrees. In his prepared remarks, Sessions said:
Yet people of faith are facing a new hostility. Really, a bigoted ideology which is founded on animus towards people of faith.
You’ll notice that they don’t rely on the facts. They don’t make better arguments. They don’t propose higher ideals.
No, they just call people names—like “hate group.”
https://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/08/09/sessions-calls-out-splc-conservative-leaders-optimistic-fbi-cut-ties/