An Open Letter to Mr. George Clooney on Hate and the Southern Poverty Law Center

May 21, 2018 by Jill

by Chuck Donovan, Public Discourse:

Please use your influence as a major donor to persuade the Southern Policy Law Center to amend its embittering and unproductive campaigns to label any political or social issue opponent as a hate group. Although controversial, organizations that fight to protect the unborn and strengthen families are not motivated by hate. Vilifying them only worsens our toxic and polarized political climate.

Dear Mr. Clooney:

If media reports are true, you are one of the donors who have made major gifts to the Southern Poverty Law Center, gifts that have allowed it to swell its treasury to a record $477 million in total assets.

I am writing not to ask you to rescind or disavow that contribution, but rather to use your influence to persuade the SPLC to amend its embittering and unproductive campaigns to label any political or social issue opponent as a hate group. This tactic is injurious both to the reputations of some outstanding people and to the flourishing of the common good. It is also a betrayal of the honorable history of the SPLC’s founding in opposition to the denial of civil rights to African Americans.

Let me explain. You and I have, I am sure, no difference of opinion about the truly odious groups condemned by the SPLC. Anyone who holds the beliefs, much less wields the symbols and tactics, of the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists merits the utter contempt of the American people. Whatever their numbers, these groups contradict the core meaning of our national project, the tenets of any decent religion, and the bounds of political discourse. They represent evil, and we must reject them with every fiber of our hearts and wills.

I have additional reasons to reject the philosophy of white supremacism, given my lifelong commitment to the sanctity of each and every human life, irrespective of creed, color, age, or condition of dependence. In the early 1990s, I coauthored a social history of the Planned Parenthood movement. It is an unfortunate fact that Margaret Sanger was a self-avowed negative eugenicist. During the course of her varied political career, she published the work of white supremacists like Lothrop Stoddard in her journal Birth Control Review. The masthead of the Review bore the legend “Birth Control: To create a race of thoroughbreds.” Stoddard’s ideas led to forced sterilization laws in the United States and provided a model for Germany’s eugenic sterilization courts in the 1930s.

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