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Dramatic story of political 'gun violence' is ignored by the gun-grabber media
8/10/13
Thomas Lifson
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But when a young gay activist named Floyd Lee Corkins bought a bagful of Chik-fil-A sandwiches and brought them to the Family Research Council headquarters intending to "smother Chick-fil-A sandwiches in [the] faces" of his victims after he shot them, he found his target on a map provided by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a left wing outfit that has prospered mightily by raising the specter of victimization by racists (and more recently, gay-haters) and fundraising on the promise to stop them.
Mark Hemingway of the Weekly Standard lays out in detail the dramatic story of heroic security guard Leo Johnson, whose recovery from his grievous wounds offers inspiration, and the multi-dimensional hypocrisy of the SPLC's role in inciting the very sort of violence it and other parts of the progressive apparat claim to be interested in preventing.
As recently as last week, SPLC cofounder Morris Dees defended the Family Research Council's inclusion on the "hate map." "Well, first of all, having a group on our hate map doesn't cause anybody to attack them any more than they attacked us for one thing or another," Dees told CNSNews.com on August 6. It takes quite a bit of hubris for Dees to defensively equate rhetorical attacks on his own organization with actual gun violence against an organization whose politics he dislikes. It also seems more than a little convenient that Dees now denies a connection between rhetoric and violence. In 2011, an SPLC blog post, "Expert: Political Rhetoric Likely a Factor in Arizona Shooting," concluded that Sarah Palin's rhetoric "could have provided a facilitating context" for the Giffords shooting, though, again, there is no evidence Loughner was exposed to it.
By the loose standard of "facilitating context," the unjust inclusion of the Family Research Council headquarters on a "hate map" otherwise filled with violent white nationalist organizations is a much more serious transgression-particularly when Corkins admits he used the map to learn about his target. And while Leo Johnson's defining characteristics are his courage and character, as long as we're talking about context, it's worth pondering why the founder of a celebrated civil rights organization is obdurately unreflective about the role his SPLC played in the shooting of a black man.
Dees's callous remarks only underscore the point that, unlike many of the more publicized incidents in recent years, the Family Research Council shooting actually warrants a discussion. If anyone is sincerely interested in frankly exploring politics and violence, Leo Johnson still works at the Family Research Council and walks past the bullet holes in the lobby every day. It might be worth asking him what he thinks. "I've worked here for 14 years. I know these people, I've worked closely with them, and I know what people they are," he says. "So to label them a hate group is absurd. It's absurd."
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