Just hours after the Southern Poverty Law Center targeted parental rights organizations as “extremists,” a U.S. senator renewed his call to strip the SPLC of its tax-exempt status.
Meanwhile, concerned parents refused to back down, and evidence emerged that the SPLC may have coordinated its results with the Biden administration.
The latest actions came as the SPLC’s annual “Year in Hate and Extremism” designated small bands of parents who object to public schools promoting pornographic books, critical race theory, and transgender ideology to their children as “antigovernment extremist groups.”
Upon the report’s release, Senator Tom Cotton renewed his call for the controversial SPLC to lose its status as a 501(c)3 organization.
He said, “The SPLC is a corrupt slush fund devoted to defamation,” adding that the parental rights organizations in the report “should be proud of the work they do for families and kids” in public schools.
The report targets anywhere from one to several hundred chapters of Parents Defending Education, Parental Rights in Education, Parents Involved in Education, Moms for Liberty, and No Left Turn in Education.
The number of groups lumped into the newly minted category of publicly threatening extremists now far outnumber the SPLC’s list of so-called “hate groups,” with 702 compared to 523.