There's more than one way to skin a cat, and there's more than one way to kill off First Amendment free speech.

The city of Columbus is considering a new policy to kill that off, excluding anyone who's ever had a connection with any of the groups on the Southern Poverty Law Center's massive "hate groups" list.

According to Tyler O'Neil of PJ Media:

The city council of Columbus, Ohio, is considering legislation to screen police officers for any connection to "hate groups" (including secretly harboring the beliefs of "hate groups"), citing the ever-so-reliable Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

That's the slovenly McCarthyite list that lumps in huge numbers of conservative civil society organizations with bona fide hate groups, refusing to distinguish between groups they disagree with and actual racists.  Belong to one of those, and you're the same as a hooded Klansman.  Yet the groups listed have zero — repeat: zero — record or policy of racism.  Their "crime" is that they aren't left-wing.

This, as Tyler O'Neill notes, excludes all Catholics, a less famous, but not less real target of the Ku Klux Klan.  One of the groups listed as a "hate group" on the SPLC list got put there because it quoted the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Indeed, if the SPLC were to take its accusations to their logical conclusion and if Columbus were to slavishly abide by the SPLC's definitions, no Roman Catholic should be allowed to join the Columbus police force.

In 2013, the SPLC branded the Ruth Institute (RI), a small Roman Catholic nonprofit, a "hate group." In order to prove that RI is a "hate group," the SPLC quoted a statement on RI's website. That statement was lifted directly from the Catechism of the Catholic Church — the definitive statement of Catholic doctrine. If the SPLC were to be consistent, it would mark the Catholic Church a "hate group," and if Columbus were to slavishly apply the SPLC's "hate group" accusations, it would have to bar every single Roman Catholic from entering the police force.

That would be the same Catholic Church that has seen its churches burn and its statues defaced, this in just the last week, by bona fide haters and probably hate groups.

O'Neil, who's written a book on this subject, notes that the SPLC has a bulked up list as a means of exaggerating the number of hate groups on its list, the better to attract donors.  They've also been caught in "hate-for-pay" schemes and have been sued repeatedly by angry groups who've been smeared on that list.  They've also been a fountainhead for violence against these conservative groups, as a lethal 2012 spray shooting attack at the Family Research Council can attest.

To trust this group's tainted list for any reason whatsoever is bound to exclude whatever few conservatives might apply to the Columbus police force, even as it does nothing to stop police racial incidents.

And that's bound to have a chilling effect on civil society groups, freedom of assembly, and freedom of speech.  Who'd belong to any group, doing any good, if the possibility of that group turning up on the SPLC list were an automatic career-killer?

This, the city council is doing to virtue-signal to other whites about their supposed anti-racism, in a move that will do absolutely nothing to halt racial incidents or weed out racist police applicants.  The police forces, if anything, are far more vulnerable to Antifa infiltration, given Antifa's interest in infiltrating the police, as well as the fact that the SPLC is never going to put them on one of its hate-group lists, and the other fact that nobody else is watching, either.

Given the SPLC's dishonest list and dishonest history, this is a move to exclude conservatives from any police posts at all and smear them as perpetrators of racism on police forces.  Yet the record shows that all racially charged incidents between police of multiple colors and Black suspects are blue-on-blue affairs, Democratic cops versus Democratic suspects.  The conservatives aren't there. 

What this amounts to is a bid to silence and smear conservatives as perpetrators of racism on the police force, a total chimera, given the widespread exclusion of conservatives within any area of blue-city government.

It's effectively a killing of the First Amendment under cover of virtual-signaling.  It's well worth a lawsuit, given the corrupted list for exclusions. 

Image credit: Pixabay public domain.