It’s time to call extremist LGBTQ orgs what they really are: hate groups

The hearts of staff and students at the Presbyterian Covenant School just outside of Nashville, Tenn. are still shattered, more than a year after a shooting rampage by a radical trans killer left three adults and three nine-year-olds dead. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) called the attack a “hate crime — against Christian children and teachers.”  A leak of the murderer’s writings revealed scrawlings stating she would “kill” to get puberty blockers.

In 2019, a transgender teen went on a rampage at the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) School in Highlands Ranch, Colo. that left one student dead and eight wounded.

In April, police in Montgomery County, Md. thwarted a mass shooting plot hatched by Andrea Ye — who goes by the name “Alex.” The would-be butcher’s 129-page manifesto included fantasies about “shooting up my former elementary school because little kids make easier targets.”

“One thing is VERY clear,” conservative media personality Benny Johnson summarized on X, “the modern trans movement is radicalizing activists into terrorists.”

It’s not just the modern trans movement. In recent years LGBTQ radicals have taken up common cause with pro-Hamas groups fomenting antisemitism on college campuses, BLM rioters burning cities and assaulting police officers, and climate extremists employing life-threatening industrial sabotage against those they deem “carbon criminals.”

Last week, my group the New Tolerance Campaign (NTC) launched HateMap.com, cataloging the activists and organizations on the left inspiring — and frequently engaging in — political violence. The NTC Hate Map was created as a resource for the media, elected officials, academic researchers, and the general public. 

The NTC Hate Map is also designed to serve as a counter to the bastardized and discredited “Hate Map” of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). At the time of its founding in 1971, the SPLC championed a noble mission: calling out legitimate racist, violent, and extremist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi cells. Over time, however, the SPLC lost its way; their once-renowned “Hate Map” morphed into a catchall for groups on the right that didn’t advance a progressive agenda.

When you see Dr. Ben Carson lumped together with the KKK, you know there’s a problem.

The SPLC’s abdication of duty doesn’t just present a one-sided picture of hate in the United States; it ensures that groups on the left are allowed a free pass to push ever-intensifying rhetoric that has the potential to inspire vicious action.

That includes groups like GLAAD and the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), both of which appear on the NTC Hate Map. Like the SPLC, GLAAD and HRC have principled roots and, at their genesis, advanced a worthy cause. That can’t be said today.

The HRC of 2024 is an organization that has given the green light to LGBTQ people to disregard the law. The group continues to push the fallacy that there is an “epidemic” of anti-transgender murders in the U.S. (data shows that the homicide risk among transgender Americans is actually less than the national average). And — in what is hands-down the organization’s greatest act of histrionics — in 2023 HRC declared a “national state of emergency for LGBTQ+ people.”

A message that there is no time and no place where LGBTQ Americans are safe anywhere in the country might gin up fundraising numbers, but it’s also the kind of rhetoric that has the potential to inspire lone-wolf attacks against “anti-LGBTQ” actors, which in HRC’s case include legislators banning sex-change treatments for minors, bakers who refuse to make a cake for a same-sex wedding, and anyone opposed to using drag queens as military recruiters.

GLAAD, launched as a media watchdog with an acronym standing for “Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation,” is now known for neither. Under the lavish spending of CEO Sarah Kate Ellis, GLAAD now simply stands for “GLAAD” (its original name deemed un-inclusive in 2013). GLAAD’s contemporary “advocacy” now even labels gay groups as “extremist.” In 2023 GLAAD accused a gay organization that opposed the sexualization of children of stoking “fear and hatred, and ultimately violence, against LGBTQ people and the LGBTQ community — specifically on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation.” For GLAAD, criticism of Pride displays at major retailers constitutes “anti-LGBTQ+ extremism.”

“Enough is enough,” Ellis declared in a statement following a mass shooting that snuffed out five lives at a Colorado gay nightspot. “LGBTQ Americans are reporting feeling unsafe, and there is documented evidence as to why, even before the horror of this past weekend and the deadly attack on LGBTQ people in Colorado Springs.”

It’s clear Ellis didn’t get the memo: the homicidal maniac who shot up Club Q in Colorado Springs is nonbinary.

Gregory T. Angelo is President of the New Tolerance Campaign and a past president of Log Cabin Republicans National (2013 – 2018).