The Family Research Council (FRC) is trying to raise the alarm about Nancy Abudu’s nomination to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Abudu is employed by the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which has labeled FRC and other groups that hold to Biblical definitions of sexuality as hate groups.
In an official letter to Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), FRC and other co-signers caution the Senate Judiciary Committee about the SPLC and its dubious history that Abudu represents.
Signed by FRC Vice President Lt. General (Ret.) Jerry Boykin, the letter states: “Ms. Abudu works for a disreputable organization that has no business being a feeder for positions to any judicial office—not even of a traffic court—let alone the second highest court system in the United States. She is a political activist, not a jurist, and is unfit to serve at the federal appellate level.”
As the strategic litigation director for the SPLC, Abudu has led the group’s voting rights efforts and has “litigated a variety of civil rights cases in federal and state courts, including challenges to state felon disenfranchisement, proof of citizenship and voter photo ID laws.”
The SPLC was initially founded to identify white supremacist groups and to sue the KluKluxKlan in the 1970s. However, over the ensuing decades the organization has drifted from targeting noted racist groups to using its platform to attack conservative, pro-life, Christian and traditional marriage-based organizations, labeling them as hate groups.
Using these inaccurate and ideologically motivated labels, SPLC and LGBTQ activists have pressured media outlets and large businesses across the country to deny politically and socially conservative groups access to certain resources. For example, FRC supporters cannot use Amazon Smile to donate a percentage of their purchase to the conservative pro-family organization, since Amazon has labeled the FRC a hate group under the SPLC’s guidance. A tech company also dropped FRC, citing the SPLC’s hate map.
FRC knows firsthand how potentially deadly such falsehoods can be. In 2012, a man targeted the FRC’s office building in Washington D.C., with the intention of committing mass murder after FRC showed up on SPLC’s “hate list.” Thankfully no one was killed in the attack, though the building manager was injured while stopping the man.
“Any group that disagrees with the SPLC about positions it advocates is deemed to be evil and worthy of destruction,” Boykin noted.
FRC points out that “Abudu’s acceptance of a senior litigation management role inside America’s largest political defamation factory disqualifies her from any position in which she would be expected to serve as an impartial arbiter of facts and laws.”
In addition to its efforts to silence certain conservative groups, in 2019 the SPLC fired co-founder Morris Dees over alleged sexual misconduct and, ironically, racism.
When it comes to the court systems, judges have been increasingly placed in a position to administer decisions on critically important topics and legislation, as Congress and even presidential administrations bypass the normal legislative process to push executive orders and administrative rules. As a result, the implications of federal judicial appointments have never been more significant.
“[J]ust as Trump chose extremely conservative nominees,” New Jersey-based lawyer David Lat explained in the Los Angeles Times. “Biden is selecting extremely liberal nominees. Lacking an organization as influential as the Federalist Society to verify ideological bona fides, his administration has shrewdly found professional proxies for progressive politics, turning to fields whose practitioners tend to be very liberal: public defenders, public-interest lawyers and attorneys representing labor unions. It’s too early to say anything definitive, but I predict Biden’s judges will be the most liberal since President Carter’s.”