Jennifer Roback Morse founder of the Ruth Institute. (Screen capture via YouTube)
The founder of an American anti-LGBT+ hate group has sought to rebuke claims that her hate group is a hate group, despite it being recognised as a hate group by a top civil rights litigation group.
Jennifer Roback Morse, who self-started the Ruth Institute, has called for NBC to “cease harassing and defaming” her group after a news report named it a hate group.
The Ruth Institute was an arm of the National Organisation for Marriage, a lobbying group that virulently opposed marriage equality, seven years ago. It according to its website, “upholds the ancient Christian teachings about marriage, family, and human sexuality”.
Morse herself became an “official spokesperson for Proposition Eight”, a 2008 ballot measure that aimed to block same-sex marriage by strictly defining it was between a man and a woman. She has gone onto lobby cabinet officials for the family to be defined strictly as involving a “natural mother and father”.
Anti-LGBT+ hate group founder says news report made her ‘madder than a wet hen’.
In the petition, Morse rebuked a 9 December story by the network that dubbed the Ruth Institute a hate group after it, among 13 other groups, received millions in emergency federal COVID-19 relief, citing the Southern Poverty Law Center as a source – it first designated the Ruth Institute as a hate group in 2013 and has each year since.
The Ruth Institute received the money as part of a rafter of relief packages to keep small businesses afloat as part of the Paycheck Protection Program. It was billed to cover the salaries of staffers, among other payments.
Monitoring groups state that she banked $37,984 of bailout money from the Small Business Administration – she alleged it was only $30,000, and said it was “trifling” compared to the sums given to Planned Parenthood.
Morse said in the petition, published on right-wing news outlet LifeSiteNews, that the NBC report made her “madder than a wet hen” as she framed the “awful” story as a left-wing “smear” campaign,
“By the SPLC’s standards, hate groups would also include women’s athletic associations which oppose allowing ‘transgendered’ men to compete in women’s sports,” the economist said, comparing NBC to “a tool of the Sexual Revolution”.
“Likewise, parents who object to men in cocktail dresses and tiaras interacting with children at Drag Queen Story Hour are equally hateful,” she added.
She said that she has formed an alliance with fellow SPLC-designated hate groups the American Family Association, the American College of Pediatricians and the Liberty Counsel. Such groups, Morse said, “defend moral truth”.