Friends of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) can no longer donate to the organization through the AmazonSmile program.
AmazonSmile is a program that allows customers to choose a nonprofit organization to receive a percentage of any Amazon purchase.
In a blog post on the ADF website, the organization says it contacted Amazon and were informed they were removed because the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) determines who is qualified.
ADF is a well-known and respected legal non-profit that represents churches, individuals and ministries in lawsuits when their constitutional rights have been infringed upon. ADF represented Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer last year before the United States Supreme Court. The Court ruled that a Missouri playground resurfacing program violated freedom of religion guaranteed by the Free Exercise Clause when they denied the materials to a church daycare.
ADF has represented dozens of high-profile cases across the nation.
Inexplicably, the SPLC had previously recognized the ADF as a hate group.
In a letter to Amazon, posted on its website, the ADF explained “ADF recently drew the ire of SPLC because of its religious beliefs and advocacy. Although the SPLC did good work many years ago, it has devolved into a far-left propaganda machine that slanders organizations with which it disagrees and destroys the possibility of civil discourse in the process. The group has been discredited by investigative journalists and charity watchdogs as a “direct mail scam” that has seen its leaders amass enormous fortunes. It is no surprise that the United States Department of Defense and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have severed ties with the SPLC.”
The ADF also points out in the letter that once the SPLC identifies an ideological opponent, its goal is to ruin them.
“As SPLC Senior Fellow Mark Potok said: “Sometimes the press will describe us as monitoring hate crimes and so on…. I want to say plainly that our aim in life is to destroy these groups, to completely destroy them.” That is the group’s mindset toward those whose views it doesn’t like. Unfortunately, it is aided and abetted by businesses like Amazon that uncritically accept SPLC’s slander and use it as a basis for its own business decisions,” the letter continued.
The ADF also asked the online retail giant to disclose in its policy that the SPLC determines who’s eligible.
“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. Millions of Americans share our beliefs and thousands of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim religious organizations subscribe to them as well. Your customers have a right to know that you’ve placed such an organization as the gatekeeper to participation in a charitable program,” the letter concluded.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has come under fire in recent years for targeting organizations not for hate, but on what they believe–such as the sanctity of life and traditional marriage.
Included on its list of hate groups of white supremacists and Nazis is the American Family Association as well as mainstream pro-life groups.
It was recently revealed that the SPLC is sitting on over $400 million in off-shore accounts with little financial accountability while the group continues to raise funds because it is ‘struggling’ to survive.