For more than 40 years, many Blacks have held the Southern Poverty Law Center in high esteem. After all it was one of the prominent legal forces that helped shape the fight for equality in America by taking on the Ku Klux Klan, the terrorist group that wreaked so much havoc in the lives of Blacks and other minorities. When it was announced that the co-founder of the SPLC, Morris Dees, was speaking at the University of Georgia, the decision to attend was easy. I wanted to hear the heart of a man who had shown himself brave in the face of blatant racism.
After abruptly interrupting a documentary on the life of Donald L. Hollowell, a civil rights legend who had represented Martin Luther King, Jr. (he helped obtain his release from the Reidsville State Prison), Morris Dees began his presentation. For the next 40 or so minutes he outlined a calculated, deliberate political agenda cloaked in the garments of the civil rights movement. He chose the most dramatic cases covered by his firm to expound on what he considered to be the injustices of today.
Every story he told was designed to motivate those in attendance to continue their support of his organization so he could go forward providing additional opportunities for justice. Talking about "colored folk" and coming a hair's breadth short of using the N word, he very solemnly, and sometimes colorfully, told stories to invoke the imagery of fear and hate that had plagued the American south. He told stories about the Vietnamese who were harassed by Texas fishermen; about the laws of the nation that eventually provided protection to the minority; and he ended with a story of horror about a Black youth who had been beaten savagely and then lynched. He quietly, but compellingly, gave a cry for justice - justice for illegal immigrant children who are not allowed to pay in-state tuition at the University of Georgia; and justice for the LGBT couples who are not allowed to have their benefits paid for by the University. And therein is the problem.
None of the stories he told had anything to do with the status of illegal immigrants; the status of Obamacare (named after the president with a "funny" name as Mr. Dees put it) or the marital privileges of those that practice the LGBT lifestyle. The stories he told were examples of an era when people were denied rights, some tortured, some killed because of their God-given traits - the color of their skin or their ethnicity.
The torture and lynching of Michael Donald, the young man killed by members of the United Klan of America, had nothing to do with the political agenda of LGBT activists. The denial of fishing rights to Vietnamese fishermen had nothing to do with the political agenda of illegal immigrants. Both of those groups can blend into the culture - the illegals can become legal, the LGBT community can choose to no longer tell us about their sexual liaisons. Yet, Morris Dees and others in his progressive political and elitist world freely exploit the most heinous, shameful era of our nation's history in support of erasing the lines of morality and, replacing them with the anything goes lifestyles they promote. It is noteworthy that the SPLC does this while sitting on a mountain of cash - $281 million - taken from countless well-meaning small donors who know little or nothing of their new agenda.
Not all of us are stupid enough to drink the progressive Kool-Aid that tries to use the history of Blacks to support behaviors that are or have been illegal. Not all of us will sit still for the rape of our legacy. Some of us, no most of us, reject, categorically, the notion that any illegal or immoral behavior, whether that of the illegal immigrant or that of the LGBT lifestyle, should be allowed to rise to the level of that which is legal and moral by riding the coattails of the civil rights movement.
Behavior is not immutable. The blood that was shed to free Blacks from slavery and then separate but equal discrimination was costly, too costly to be squandered on the political agenda of those seeking to force the culture to acknowledge behavior as an inalienable right.