ADF Receives Unlikely Defender Following Amazon Fundraising List Decision
Friends of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) can no longer donate to the organization through the AmazonSmile program.
AmazonSmile is a program that allows customers to choose a nonprofit organization to receive a percentage of any Amazon purchase.
In a blog post on the ADF website, the organization says IT contacted Amazon to find out what happened.
Amazon informed the nonprofit that they were removed because the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) determines who is qualified.
Previously, the SPLC recognized the ADF as a hate group.
In a letter to Amazon, posted on its website, the ADF explained "ADF recently drew the ire of SPLC because of its religious beliefs and advocacy. Although the SPLC did good work many years ago, it has devolved into a far-left propaganda machine that slanders organizations with which it disagrees and destroys the possibility of civil discourse in the process. The group has been discredited by investigative journalists and charity watchdogs as a "direct mail scam" that has seen its leaders amass enormous fortunes. It is no surprise that the United States Department of Defense and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have severed ties with the SPLC."
The ADF also points out in the letter that once the SPLC identifies an ideological opponent, its goal is to ruin them.
"As SPLC Senior Fellow Mark Potok said: "Sometimes the press will describe us as monitoring hate crimes and so on…. I want to say plainly that our aim in life is to destroy these groups, to completely destroy them." That is the group's mindset toward those whose views it doesn't like. Unfortunately, it is aided and abetted by businesses like Amazon that uncritically accept SPLC's slander and use it as a basis for its own business decisions," the letter continued.
The ADF also asked the online retail giant to disclose in its policy that the SPLC determines who's eligible.
"If you are going to rely on a discredited partisan organization like the SPLC to determine who is eligible to participate in AmazonSmile, you should disclose that in your policy and to your customers. Millions of Americans share our beliefs and thousands of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim religious organizations subscribe to them as well. Your customers have a right to know that you've placed such an organization as the gatekeeper to participation in a charitable program," the letter concluded.
CBN News has learned the ADF has received support from an unlikely defender. An organization who's CEO and founder says he pretty much disagrees with everything the ADF stands for in terms of law and policy.
Michael L. "Mikey" Weinstein, the CEO and founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, says he wrote a letter of support to Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon on behalf of the ADF because of his years-long friendship with several of the ADF attorneys.
In the letter, Weinstein asked Bezos "to reconsider and kindly reverse your decision and permit ADF once again to participate in the Amazon Smile program."
"I've learned to separate religious and political viewpoints from the people. I learned that these are individuals with an inspirational amount of personal integrity and character, honor and intelligence," he told CBN News.
