Hate Group Founder Joins Massachusetts Governor Race

BOSTON, MA — Gov. Charlie Baker won the endorsement of the Massachusetts Republican Convention, but he will be facing a challenger in the GOP primary in controversial Conservative pastor Scott Lively. Lively's running for one reason, his website says:

"To bring Biblical values back into the political arena here. These are the same values that still define the grassroots of the Republican Party."

That platform won him almost double the 15 percent of the delegate vote needed to get to September primary. (Baker won some 70 percent.)

So who his Lively? The lawyer and Conservative pastor ran for governor in 2014. He lives in Springfield with his wife. Oh, and he founded an anti-LGBT hate group, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Here are some other things about Lively:

• He is the co-author of a book claiming that gay men were behind the Holocaust (even though homosexuals were targeted by Nazis) because gay men ran the Nazi party. Historians have debunked the claims in his 1995 book "The Pink Swastika."
• He got into politics in the 1980s because he felt a call to protest abortion. "Abortion is the intentional killing of a living human being and should be criminalized,” he wrote on his website.
• He's pro-guns. "The more guns in the hands of responsible citizens, the safer we will all be both from criminals and from any power, foreign or domestic, who would seek to subjugate us," his website says
• And pro-Trump, which he touched on in his speech at the GOP convention:

You might also remember Lively from comments he made about Ugandans in 2009, when he promoted the idea that the country should crack down on its gay population for being rapists and pedophiles.

Ugandan LGBT activists sued Lively for conspiring to deny gay people their human rights in Uganda. The suit was dismissed in 2017, but Massachusetts Federal Judge Michael Ponsor decried Lively's actions in his opinion. “The question before the court is not whether Defendant’s actions to ... demonize, intimidate, and injure LGBTI people in Uganda constitute violations of international law. They do,” he wrote.

Lively appealed the dismissal, wanting to have Ponsor's opinion cut out of his ruling. His lawyer argues the judge “improperly littered his order with a prolonged tirade against Lively, badly distorting his Christian views and activism.” The case is before the U.S. Court of Appeals in Boston.

What does Baker say?

Despite the fact that Lively got 600-plus delegate votes, Baker is consistently polled as the country’s most popular governor.

Baker has mostly referred reporters to a statement at the convention when asked about Lively.

"Look I can't get in the minds of people who made decisions to support us or to support anybody else. But I can tell you, though, Scott Lively, a lot of what he says, a lot of what he believes, doesn't belong in public discourse," said Baker to reporters during the convention.

What do pundits say?

There are few who expect Lively to make it past the primary.

“When you've got the nation's most popular governor at the top of the ballot, certainly it's strange that Scott Lively would be able to get from the Republican conventiongoers that kind of support, and that kind of a vote," Massachusetts political consultant Anthony Cignoli told Mass Live. "Did these conventiongoers, these delegates, go there specifically for him; was this an effort that was orchestrated and to the credit of his campaign? Or is this indicative of what the base of the Republican party regulars are?”

But doesn't this conversation sound familiar?

Read more:

Scott Lively's Appearance: Mass Live

Scott on WBUR, in which he's asked about a lawsuit from his days in Oregon.

And from the 2014 election:

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File Photo by Jenna Fisher/Patch