On Tuesday, the US House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government conducted a hearing with several speakers discussing the effect of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) on free speech, and its targeting of sociopolitical organizations.
A release for the hearing, titled “Partisan and Profitable: The SPLC’s Influence on Federal Civil Rights Policy,” stated the hearing “will examine the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) coordinated efforts with the Biden-Harris Administration to target Christian and conservative Americans and deprive them of their constitutional rights to free speech and free association.”
Andrew Sypher, Executive Vice President of Field Operations of Turning Point USA, testified at the hearing. Other speakers included President of the Family Research Council, Tony Perkins, Senior Editor of The Daily Signal Tyler O’Neil , and Executive Director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty Amanda Tyler.
The SPLC is a southern-based non-profit civil rights organization that began during the civil rights era. Subcommittee Chairman Chip Roy, R-Texas, said the SPLC was formerly a “legitimate civil rights organization” that has “reinvented itself as a political fundraising machine built on an ever-expanding ideologically-defined hate mission.”
During his address to the committee, Sypher referred to admonitions made by late Founder of Turning Point USA about the SPLC’s “hate map.”
“Charlie warned, just before his murder, that the SPLC’s hate map designation, equating campus kids who promote the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and pro-life, pro family values with the KKK and neo-Nazis, would put Turning Point in the crosshairs. This proved prophetic,” Sypher said.
“I find it ironic that a civil rights organization is marginalizing the country,” he also said of the SPLC.
