Treasury traces SPLC to debanking of Christians after group dismissed it as conspiracyhttps://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/investigations/4777156/treasury-traces-splc-debanking-christians-conspiracy-theory/Federal finance authorities have identified the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “hate group” labels as the driving force behind the debanking of conservative individuals and organizations, particularly clients that were giving to Christian causes.
The explosive findings directly discredit a recent proclamation from the SPLC declaring, as part of its “Hatewatch” monitoring project, that anti-Christian debanking was a conspiracy theory spread by the “Christian supremacy movement.”
Though only a regulatory audit, fulfilling an executive order from President Donald Trump to ensure that banks were not discriminating against customers on the basis of their political or religious beliefs, the government’s findings add to the SPLC’s latest woes.
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The 47-page report said the SPLC played a key role in the debanking of, as well as the denial of financial services to, conservative clients wanting to support Christian groups or individuals financially.
But just last year, the SPLC published a “Hatewatch” memo claiming that institutional debanking of the religious Right was an imaginary threat existing only in the minds of Christian supremacists called “dominionists,” those who believe that Christians are “called by God to exercise dominion over every aspect of society” by taking control of all institutions.
In particular, the SPLC alleged that the “anti-LGBTQ+ hate group” Alliance Defending Freedom, a mainstream Christian conservative legal firm known for taking up religious rights cases, was pushing these “conspiratorial claims of Christian victimhood.”
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It turns out, however, that many of the banks highlighted in the Treasury report were regularly basing their decisions to debank certain disfavored customers on the SPLC’s classification of “hate groups” operating in America.
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Treasury Department oversight officials say they discovered that PNC Bank declined to issue a line of credit to a media company in late 2021 due to “reputation[al] risk” concerns about its conservative owners.
The situation was brought before the bank’s environmental and social governance group, and employees at the bank allegedly noted that one owner’s foundation “has funded several Christian conservative groups, including several identified as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center.”
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According to the Treasury report, WePay was monitoring for violations of its terms of service using particular search terms and phrases, such as “MAGA,” “Make America Great,” and “America First,” to flag merchants who might be involved in “prohibited activities.”
I wish more debanked orgs were named in the article, but that the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) was one does not surprise me. The ADF has, among other people and groups, represented people/groups the SPLC hates, thus earning the "hate group" label. The ADF is actually worse, by SPLC standards, as it has
won such cases ...
all the way to the US Supreme Court.
