Where’s the Hate? Thanks for asking.

Being dumped by Vanco, our credit card processor, has given the Ruth Institute a huge amount of free publicity for our mission of dealing with family breakdown: understanding it, healing it, ending it. It has also shown why no sensible person should take the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Hate Map” at face value.

My favorite article along those lines is this one, from Megan McArdle, writing at Bloomberg. She actually looked at the materials used as “evidence” that we deserve to be labeled as so anti-LGBT that we should count as a “hate group.”

“I spent a day diving down the rabbit hole of one of the listings on the hate group, for the Ruth Institute, a small nonprofit that thinks the sexual revolution was a giant mistake. The Ruth Institute does seem to have a couple of marginally attached figures who have at some point theorized an unsupported connection between homosexuality and pedophilia. But however wrongheaded and insulting this may be, by itself, it hardly merits branding the whole organization a “hate group.” And a lot of the other “evidence” for this designation is simply … well, fully deserving of those contemptuous quotation marks.”

Upon examination, she finds a big nothing-burger: “misspeaking in a radio interview, quoting the Vatican and promoting (rather tame) articles.” that I didn’t even write. 

One link presents the Ruth Institute’s president, Jennifer Roback Morse, as having offered the “race-baiting” comment that President Barack Obama was “more gay than he is black” — an assertion that turns out to be an out-of-context quotation of an obvious verbal slip during a radio interview. That link also asserts that the Ruth Institute “reprinted a column blasting the LGBT movement’s ‘mythology of grievance and sexual oppression’”; in fact, the column is on the broader topic of the sexual revolution, not just LGBT activism, and the “mythology” refers to the (true) fact that many of the landmark legal cases that paved the revolution’s legal path, including Roe v. Wade and Lawrence v. Texas, were not entirely what they seemed. …

The SPLC also criticizes Morse (a Catholic) for calling homosexuality “intrinsically disordered,” which I grant does sound gratuitously insulting to non-Catholics. But this is in fact a technical term in Catholic theology which also covers things heterosexuals frequently get up to. Disagree with it (and Catholic sexual teaching) as you will, it is not by itself evidence of a special animus toward homosexuals.

And so on. I really appreciate the time and effort that Ms. McArdle took to read for herself, and discover the flimsy basis for our designation as a “hate group.”