It takes a special kind of insanity to find a Klan hood beneath an African movement to protect the natural family from abortion and LGBTQ+ ideology, but that’s exactly what the Southern Poverty Law Center is claiming.

The SPLC—which trades on its history of suing KKK groups into bankruptcy to smear conservative and Christian nonprofits by putting them on a “hate map” with Klan chapters—trained its sights on the Pan-African Conference on Family Values, which will take place in Nairobi, Kenya, in May.

The SPLC claimed that “international efforts of hate and extremist groups developed an international playbook built on ‘natural family’ rhetoric.”

“Cobbled together from white supremacist, anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ+ tropes that link fears of declining Christian cultural supremacy with a falling birth rate, ‘natural family’ rhetoric advances Western white social norms and imposes a so-called ‘natural order’ on African countries,” the SPLC’s Emerson Hodges wrote.

Anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of social conservatism and the global South will immediately grasp the problem. While Western social conservative groups do work with African politicians and African organizations, the Africans tend to be more socially conservative than their Western allies. If anything, the U.S.-based groups hold the Africans back.

I myself am a member of The Falls Church Anglican, which split off from the Episcopal Church to join the Anglican Church in North America, an Anglican body that affiliates more closely with churches in Africa—because those churches tend to follow the Bible, especially on social issues, more closely than the Episcopal Church.

The SPLC’s Claim About Pro-Family Colonialism

Yet the SPLC insinuates that social conservatism and a defense of the natural family is a Western imposition on African countries. The reverse is true—LGBTQ and abortion activist groups have attempted to spread their false gospel of sexual liberation across the Safari continent, and it continues to fall on deaf ears. The Biden administration and the United Nations have shoveled money into turning Africa rainbow, and the Africans don’t take kindly to this new ideological colonialism.

So, how did the SPLC justify claiming the exact opposite? Well, Hodges decided to take a pot-shot at my old professor.

I did a double-take when I saw the SPLC citing Allan C. Carlson, a retired professor who used to teach at Hillsdale College, my alma mater. Carlson is harder to reach these days, and it seems that Hodges suspected Carlson would be too retired to respond to Hodges’ attempt to trace the “white supremacy” of natural family rhetoric to him.

As it happens, I took a class on the history of the family in America from Carlson, so I happen to know a bit about his views.

Hodges quoted a 2013 speech Carlson gave in Moscow titled “The Natural Family in an Unnatural World.” He noted Carlson’s claim that low birth rates, “the rapid spread of cohabitation,” the redefinition of marriage, the “early sexualization of children,” and divorce are “signs of a fundamental challenge to the life of the home.”

Yet Hodges insisted that Carlson was simply aiming to “repackage rhetoric that originated in far-right political movements’ racist reactions to immigrants to both the United States and European countries from their former colonies during the mid-20th century.” The SPLC writer posited that concerns about the demographic crisis originate in the fear of “white genocide,” which he described as “myths that white Christian society is under attack or being replaced by uncivilized, non-Christian black and brown people.” He also claimed these myths “are represented across almost all hard-right factions.”

“To Carlson and the purveyors of natural family rhetoric, indigenous family structures across Africa, Asia and South America that do not follow the ‘nuclear’ model as well as the use of sexual education and family planning services that include legal and safe abortions are inconsistent with Christian culture,” Hodges intoned. “This ethnocentric and colonial model, however, is predicated on the belief that white Christian norms about family and society can and should be imposed in other cultural contexts and that adherence to conservative Christian policy preferences provides an accurate measure of a society’s progress toward civilization.”

Misrepresenting Carlson

All this is hogwash.

Hodges clearly never took a class with Carlson. I did, so I can tell you that Carlson loudly condemned the ignominious history of forced sterilization and racially targeted abortion in the United States.

Carlson, a defender of life and dignity for all races, champions the committed relationship of a man and a woman in marriage as the natural foundation for a healthy society. He doesn’t oppose LGBTQ ideology because of some hidden hatred for people—he supports the natural family because he thinks it’s the best solution for various social ills, and he has the research to back it up.

Furthermore, he never attacked “indigenous family structures.” He even suggested that a more involved extended family may be beneficial, and lamented the modern trend toward isolation of the nuclear family.

Carlson himself pushed back.

“If I understand the argument here, my [World Congress of Families] colleagues and I have been using ‘white supremacist‘ language to support young black Africans who wish to marry and bear and raise many children,” the retired professor told The Daily Signal. “This is perhaps the most tangled, bizarre, and even hilarious example of political analysis that I have ever encountered.”

“The real source of our attention to Sub-Saharan Africa, broadly, and Kenya, in particular, was the work and example of the Kenyan novelist, medical doctor, and family advocate Margaret Ogola,” Carlson added. Ogola (1958-2011), a novelist and medical doctor, “identified and countered the true ‘Westernizers’ seeking to crush natural family life and sharply reduce the number of African babies.” 

What Is ‘Indigenous Family Structure?’

As for the SPLC’s claim that social conservatives—not the LGBTQ movement—are the true opponents of “indigenous family structure,” Carlson pointed to a 1999 Ogola speech at the World Congress of Families II in Geneva, Switzerland.

Ogola explained that “primitive peoples living close to nature mostly believed in a triple human presence in the world,” consisting of the living dead (dead ancestors who retained an interest in the world of the living), the living (who must keep alive the memory of the dead and transmit life to the unborn), and the unborn (who depend on the behavior of the living).

“It appears that the general instinct of humanity (standing in awe before the power of the procreative act) was to shield the sexual act from misuse; and also to shield society from the impact that the misuse of sex could unleash on a populace,” Ogola said. “For example, a child born out of wedlock was in a way removed from the three presences—that of the living dead, the living, and the yet to be born. Who could one say were his ancestors? Who would be the ancestors of his children? From whom would he inherit land?”

Ogola lamented the “massive collapse of an almost universal ideal”—the ideal of men and women committed to one another for the good of both ancestors and children—and attributed it to the Sexual Revolution and modern individualism: contraception; the demystification of sex; an entirely individualistic philosophy; the worldwide assumption of a small family norm; extraordinary expectations of glorious romance; and the “loss of the sense of a Deity to whom all are ultimately answerable for their actions.”

Contrary to the SPLC’s insinuations, this is no Western imposition on “indigenous values,” a phrase the SPLC appears to use as a stand-in for the insane suggestion that LGBTQ activism, abortion, and the Sexual Revolution are deeply rooted in African culture.

Why Does All This Matter?

Conservatives often laugh at the SPLC, and claims like this are indeed laughable. Unfortunately, the joke goes above the heads of the Left’s elites in the donor class, the Democrat Party, the legacy media, and even Big Tech and corporate America. These people, brainwashed as they are by the woke ideology the SPLC espouses, often use the SPLC as a cudgel to silence their political and ideological opponents.

My latest book, “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government,” traces the impact the SPLC had in the Biden administration, and reveals why this organization is very much a threat the Right should take seriously.