THE ART OF CREATIVE SMEARING: Megan McArdle nails it on how the SPLC uses overbroad and malleable ideology to smear conservatives:

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.”

As the Professor says: “Read the whole thing.”™