Scott Lively — an anti-gay pastor in Springfield, Massachusetts, who tried to unseat Governor Charlie Baker — has announced he's leaving the state to open a bible college.
Lively claimed the Nazi party was run by closeted gay people, and he was sued for instigating a brutal anti-gay policy in Uganda.
Even the judge in Massachusetts who dismissed the lawsuit — as a matter of jurisdiction — described Lively's ideas as "odious" and "crackpot bigotry."
Yet Lively won 36 percent of the vote in last year's Republican primary for governor.
Now Lively says he's done with politics and plans to start a bible college in Tennessee.
Sarah McBride of the Human Rights Campaign said many politicians promote an anti-LGBT agenda, "but [Lively] was so extreme," she said. "I think what's clear is whether he's in Massachusetts, California, Oregon or really any place in this country, the public has no patience for the kind of dehumanizing, false, and in some cases deadly kind of rhetoric and policies he put forward."
Lively is now asking supporters to help him retire $30,000 in campaign debt.
