Comedian and Senator Al Franken took a swing at the Alliance Defending Freedom Group, a pro-life organization, calling them a “hate group”.
“I mean, this is a group that fights against equal treatment of LGBT people; this is a group which calls for the sterilization of transgender people abroad,” Franken asserted.
https://youtu.be/QIZAxf4BFBk
Religious beliefs be damned, right? At least that’s how I took this. I bet if this was any other religion he’d of tippy toed all around it. Pathetic. He wasn’t even that funny on Saturday Night Live.
As reported by The Daily Caller:
ADF spokeswoman Kerri Kupec debunked this smear tactic in an interview with The Daily Signal, saying that Franken simply repeated the Southern Poverty Law Center’s slander against ADF’s international affiliate and that they would “never condone government-compelled sterilization, as he alleged.”
“I question your judgment,” Franken said. “The root word of judgment is a judge.”
“I gather that the SPLC’s designation of ADF as a hate group is controversial,” Barrett shot back. “I didn’t learn about that until more recently. But, again, that was not my experience with the Blackstone program.”
The ADF has since shot back against Franken castigating them as a “hate group.” Michael Farris, president and CEO of Alliance Defending Freedom, said in a press release, “it is deeply regrettable that Sen. Franken is misinformed about our work on behalf of religious freedom.”
“There is a real danger of conflating genuine hate groups, like the Ku Klux Klan, with mainstream religious beliefs that are shared by millions of Americans and people from all walks of life across the world,” he said, adding, “As a member of Congress, Sen. Franken needs to fact-check before parroting discredited attacks by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a once-proud civil rights organization that is now a left-wing smear machine known to incite violence.”