Anti-Gay Pastor Scott Lively Has Lost to Charlie Baker

Scott Lively, a pastor from Springfield notorious for his fixation on exposing “the gay agenda,” has lost his long-shot bid to unseat Charlie Baker and win the Republican nomination for Massachusetts governor. But he did, however, manage to get about a third of voters in the state’s GOP primary to support him. When all the votes were tallied, Lively had 36.1 percent of the vote, more than 98,000 people.

For those unfamiliar with this guy, his contributions to bigotry around the world are impressive. They include a book called The Pink Swastika that assigns blame for the Holocaust to a shadowy homosexual cabal, and a tour through Uganda that inspired a vicious crackdown on that country’s LGBT community and ensnared Lively in a lawsuit alleging he committed alleging he committed a crime against humanity.

Lively garnered lots of attention earlier this year when he managed to peel away a disheartening number of delegates, nearly 28 percent, at the MassGOP convention in Worcester. Lively neglected to mention his down-with-gays point of view at the gathering, instead focusing on his devotion to other conservative causes and his support for President Trump. So it was unclear how many of those delegates knew exactly who they were dealing with, and how many were merely trying to send a pro-Trump signal to Baker, a relative moderate and a Trump critic. Lively kept this act up during the campaign, circulating ads and mailers that compared his and Bakers’ conservative bonafides and made no mention of the gay Nazis.

But that was then and this is now. Voters had ample time to learn about Lively’s incendiary past before today’s primary, perhaps via his media appearances or in the near-universal condemnation he received on both sides of the aisle. So we just found out how many Republican voters in the state either knew about his virulent homophobia and voted for him anyway, or who found out he supported Trump and decided that was all they needed to hear.