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 response

U.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 gender ideology, critical race theory, and climate alarmism.”

In a column for the Signal last year, O’Neil said he left the Episcopal Church because of its “watered-down bastardization of Christianity.” He specifically criticized its LGBTQ-affirming doctrines in place since 1976 and the fact that it consecrated a lesbian priest in 1977, a gay priest in 1989, and a gay bishop in 2013. More recently, the church approved the ordination of transgender clergy in 2012.

“Forgive me if I don’t think that pumping kids full of experimental drugs to make them resemble members of the opposite sex in a futile attempt to disavow their biological sex is a form of ‘respecting’ a person’s ‘dignity,’” O’Neil scoffed.

But he also has regularly defended the American Freedom Law Center, a far-right nonprofit defending open hate groups in court. That recently included funding a defense for Andrew Hess, a Michigan man facing terrorist threat charges for calling for an election official there to be hanged. O’Neil has criticized the Michigan Attorney General’s Office for even having a hate crimes unit dedicated to investigating crimes targeting minority and marginalized populations.

In his book on the SPLC, an organization that the Trump administration launched an investigation of earlier this year, O’Neil criticizes the organization’s long history of tracking activity by the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi and antisemitic groups organized across the country.

O’Neil has also spoken in support of conversion therapy and called supporters of transgender rights “terrorists.” He has showered praise on recently ousted Hungarian leader Victor Orban, who had a long history of censoring dissenting views, including pro-LGBTQ speech.

The House Judiciary Committee did not return calls for comment.