Georgetown University, America’s oldest Roman Catholic institution of higher learning and located in the U.S. capital of Washington, D.C., actively encouraged visitors to its website to contribute to a vast array of left-wing activist groups in the name of supporting “civil rights.” A page on the website for Georgetown’s law library asked visitors to give to Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, the leftist attack dog Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), LGBT law group Lambda Legal, and others.
“One way to resist oppression is to strengthen the organizations that fight against oppressors. You can make a change, even if it’s just an hour a week or a dollar a week. If we all give just a little, it adds up and it keeps our civil rights, our environment — our nation — from being destroyed,” the page, entitled “A Brief History of Civil Rights in the United States,” urged visitors.
The page listed all sorts of left-wing advocacy groups, including the SPLC, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), NARAL, Planned Parenthood, EMILY’s List, and Lambda Legal. It also solicited requests for organizations users “would like to see added to this list.”
Adding insult to injury, the law library website for America’s oldest Catholic University gave “special thanks to jezebel.com for the genesis of this list of organizations.” Even if Jezebel were not literally named after one of the Bible’s most ungodly villains, the idea that Georgetown would endorse a list of groups from this far-left website is horrifying.
Georgetown hid the page from the public (although students may still be able to access it) after a petition against it from the conservative pro-life Roman Catholic organization Tradition Family Property (TFP) garnered more than 13,000 signatures.
The petition, “Tell Georgetown to STOP Encouraging Contributions to Planned Parenthood and Other Pro-Abortion Groups,” launched on May 30. It highlighted the following groups on the Georgetown civil rights list: Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, the Center for Reproductive Rights, the National Organization for Women (NOW), EMILY’s List, ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and Lambda Legal.
“Although these groups trample Church teaching by promoting abortion and the destruction of God’s marriage, Georgetown tells web visitors to support them with time and money,” the petition declared. “Ironically, the Georgetown Law Library web page dedicated to the history of ‘civil rights’ includes a pitch to support pro-abortion groups that deny the first and most basic right — namely, the right to life.”
TFP also attacked Georgetown for hiring the Senior Associate General Counsel and Director of Advocacy and Political Law of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Inc., Prof. Zoe Segal-Reichlin.
While the original article still appears in search results, “visibility settings” prevent the general public from accessing it, Campus Reform’s Zachary Petrizzo reported. This suggests students may still be able to read it, however.
The original article has been archived on the Internet and is still available for viewing by the general public at this link.
Besides the obvious problem with a Catholic institution supporting pro-abortion groups like Planned Parenthood and NARAL, this page should also cause scandal in supporting other groups on the list, particularly the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
While the SPLC began as a legal advocacy firm to attack racist terror groups like the Ku Klux Klan, it expanded its list of “hate groups” to include political opponents based on their ideological stances. It has marked mainstream conservative groups as “hate groups” because they oppose same-sex marriage, and last year, 47 nonprofit leaders denounced the SPLC’s “hate list” in an open letter to the media. The SPLC has admitted that its “hate group” list is based on “opinion,” and that it intends to “destroy these groups completely.”
In 2012, a terrorist by the name of Floyd Lee Corkins II used the SPLC’s “hate map” to find and target the Family Research Council (FRC). He broke into the offices with a semi-automatic pistol, intending to kill everyone in the building and place a Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich by their bodies. Worse, he intended to move on from FRC and target other groups maligned by the SPLC.
The SPLC did not remove FRC from its “hate group” list despite this attack. Disgustingly, the group also maligned as an “anti-Islamic extremist” the Muslim reformer Maajid Nawaz, listing his visit to a strip club for his bachelor party as proof that he deserved to be on the “hate list.”
More a propos for Georgetown, the SPLC marked the Ruth Institute, a Catholic pro-family organization, a “hate group,” citing the Catechism of the Catholic Church. In order to be consistent, the SPLC would have to mark the entire Roman Catholic Church as a “hate group” for its conservative “anti-LGBT” positions on marriage and family.
This makes it particularly noxious and damning that Georgetown University encouraged — and may still be encouraging — students to donate to the SPLC. This Catholic organization has no business backing an organization that considers the Catechism of the Catholic Church a “hate group” document.
Furthermore, Georgetown should be using its influence to fight back against the cultural swing toward the SPLC. Last year, the left-wing attack dog received widespread support from large companies like Apple, which pledged $1 million to the group, and J.P. Morgan, which gave $500,000. CNN, ABC, and NBC repeated SPLC talking points branding Alliance Defending Freedom a “hate group.”
Many of the groups attacked by the SPLC have sued the organization for defamation, including Nawaz and the Christian nonprofits Liberty Counsel and D. James Kennedy Ministries. Even so, tech companies like Vanco Payments, GuideStar, Amazon, and Google have used the “hate group” list to drop service from mainstream conservative organizations. Just this month, the SPLC attacked PragerU, a conservative organization that is suing Google and YouTube for restricting its videos.
Rather than siding with the groups the SPLC has unfairly maligned and compared to the KKK, Georgetown raised money for the organization attacking them — an organization that considers what Catholics believe to be “hateful.”
America’s pro-life Catholics (I repeat myself) deserve an apology for Georgetown’s tremendous misstep here, as do the many individuals and groups who found themselves at the wrong end of the SPLC’s partisan wrath.
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