Don't buy what SPLC is selling

One does not generally expect a great deal of theological depth or accuracy in a newspaper that promotes the Wicca religion (Coeur d’Alene Press, Dec. 20, 2011), but your Nov. 3 front-page story on the Society of St. Pius X was appalling even by pagan standards. For one thing, the repeating of the anti-Semitic slur against the SSPX had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that child abuser Kevin Stoniker was once worked as a camp counselor for the Society. As an illustration, imagine if the story read:

“John Smith has been accused of sexually molesting children. Smith was employed by the Handy Hardware Company. It has been alleged that the Handy Hardware chain of hardware stores has engaged in a national price-fixing scheme involving the sale of plywood.”

Wha?

Secondly, your citation to the Southern Poverty Law Center as a reputable authority regarding bigotry and prejudice is laughable. Investigative reporters on both the left and the right have exposed the SPLC as a sleazy, paranoia-promoting organization whose primary goal is to rake in tons of money. For example, in a 2009 article for CounterPunch magazine entitled “King of the Hate Business,” writer Alexander Cockburn castigated Morris Dees and the SPLC for using the 2008 election of Barack Obama as America’s first black president as yet another wringer for squeezing out direct-mail donations from “trembling liberals” by painting an apocalyptic picture of “millions of [anti-Obama] extremists primed to march down Main Street draped in Klan robes, a copy of Mein Kampf tucked under one arm and a Bible under the other.”

As reported in the Weekly Standard (April 13, 2013):

Cockburn was following on the heels of Ken Silverstein, who in 2000 wrote an article for the reliably liberal Harper’s magazine titled “The Church of Morris Dees.” Silverstein accused the SPLC of manufacturing connections between the “hate groups” that it highlighted in its numerous mailings — back then the groups on the SPLC list tended to be mostly fringe militia organizations — and the Columbine-style school shootings and a wave of black church arsons during the 1990s that were a staple of the SPLC’s direct-mail panic pleas…

Silverstein followed up with more of the same in a 2007 blog post for Harper’s: “What [the SPLC I docs best … is to raise obscene amounts of money by hyping fears about the power of [right-wing fringe] groups; hence the SPLC has become the nation’s richest ‘civil rights’ organization.” In 2001, JoAnn Wypijewski wrote in the Nation: “Why the ISPLC I continues 10 keep ‘Poverty’ (or even ‘Law’) in it’ name can be ascribed only to nostalgia or a cynical understanding of the marketing possibilities in class guilt.”

What has infuriated the SPLC’s liberal critics is their suspicion that Morris Dees has used the SPLC primarily as a fundraising machine fueled by his directmail talents that generates a nice living for himself (the SPLC’s 2010 tax filing list s a compensation package of $345,000 for him as the organization’s chief trial counsel and highest-paid employee) and a handful of other high ranking SPLC officials plus luxurious office’ and perk s, but that docs relatively little in the way of providing the legal services to poor people that its name implies.

As to the charge that the SSPX is anti-Semitic, that charge is blatantly false. I have attended SSPX chapels for close to 20 years. During that time I have never seen or heard any evidence of racial, ethnic or religious hatred whatsoever. Being of Jewish descent myself, I can assure you that I would not attend an anti-Semitic church. Your article’s statement that the SSPX “broke away” from the Roman Catholic Church is also false. The Society is composed of priests totally loyal to the Catholic Church, but refuse to accept certain non-dogmatic ambiguous language contained in some of the documents of the Second Vatican Council, and further oppose the liturgical changes for the Mass that followed the Council. These controversies have nothing to do with Jews or Judaism.

James Bendell is an attorney and Post Falls resident.