The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a non-profit public interest law firm that specializes in defending religious freedom issues, recently found that it had been kicked off AmazonSmile’s list of organizations to which customers can donate small portions of their purchases. The reason ADF was booted — they had been flagged by that infamous leftist organization, the Southern Poverty Law Center, as a “hate group.” Writing to Amazon, ADF president Michael Farris expressed his frustration, stating, “If you are going to rely on a discredited partisan organization like the SPLC to determine who is eligible to participate in AmazonSmile, you should disclose that in your policy and to your customers. Your customers have a right to know that you’ve placed such an organization as the gatekeeper to participation in a charitable program.”

As we have repeatedly noted, the SPLC is anything but objective in its assessment of what constitutes as a “hate group.” Quite the contrary. This hate-hustling organization willfully conflates conservative political views and religious convictions with actual hate groups such as the KKK and neo-Nazis. Any group that holds to a traditional view on marriage or a Biblical view on sexuality has been labeled by the SPLC as a hate group.

And what is ADF’s “crime” that got them tagged as a “hate group” by the SPLC? They are currently representing cake-maker Jack Phillips before the Supreme Court, giving defense for his refusal to make a wedding cake for a homosexual wedding due to his religious conviction. Meanwhile, the biggest abortion provider in the nation, Planned Parenthood, is listed as an eligible AmazonSmile charity recipient. Go figure.