Anti-LGBTQ+ activist to testify before Congress against Southern Poverty Law Center

As U.S. House Republicans scrutinize one of the nation’s most prominent anti-hate groups, they will bring in a right-wing commentator who spent years villainizing LGBTQ+ Americans and their allies.Tyler O’Neil, now a senior editor at The Daily Signal, was listed as the top witness at a House Judiciary Committee hearing on the Southern Poverty Law Center being held Wednesday. That’s largely because O’Neil penned a book, “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” entirely dedicated to disparaging the decades of work fighting hate crimes done by the SPLC.But in his capacity at the Daily Signal, O’Neil has also defended the American Freedom Law Center, a group that defends accused domestic terrorists, and has disparaged the Episcopal Church as “one of the most flaccid and spineless of the dying mainline Protestant denominations,” specifically over its stances on immigration and homosexuality.“House Republicans can't find credible witnesses for their anti-civil rights crusade next week because they have no credible case. They're giving a microphone to one of the far-right's most discredited, anti-LGBTQ+ extremists and dressing it up as congressional oversight,” said Kyle Herrig, Executive Director of the Congressional Integrity Project.“It's all in service of the Trump administration's backwards prosecution of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the premiere organization tracking the very extremism people like Tyler O'Neill support. Attacking the SPLC doesn't do anything to make Americans safer. It just makes it easier for racist, anti-LGBTQ+ organizations to operate in the dark."The Advocate emailed O’Neil for comment, but received no responseU.S. Rep. Jim Jordan, the chair of House Judiciary and a politician with his own problematic record of glazing over wrongdoing, will bring in O’Neil because he has “long studied the nonprofits that aim to silence dissent from the Left’s orthodoxy on hot-button issues such as g