Scott Lively, a Republican gubernatorial candidate in Massachusetts and a vocal opponent of LGBT rights, said Wednesday that he's shuttering a nonprofit organization that he founded in 1997 while living in California.

In announcing the closure of Abiding Truth Ministries, Lively described the organization as a “single-issue pro-family” group and as a response to Romer V. Evans, the 1996 Supreme Court case that struck down a Colorado voter-approved constitutional amendment (Amendment 2; also the No Special Rights Act) that prohibited discrimination protections based on sexual orientation.

Justice Anthony Kennedy authored the Romer opinion.

“In doing this, Kennedy … masterminded the obnoxious and intellectually vacuous political strategy of defining all disagreements with 'gay' political goals as 'hate' (and created the new LGBT narrative that homosexuality is immutable and unchangeable – something the 'gay' movement had not asserted as dogma previously),” Lively wrote.

“Justice Kennedy … has made pro-family advocacy in the so-called 'culture war' virtually impossible with his prior rulings, and there remains no reason for Abiding Truth Ministries to keep its doors open once he has resigned. So, I am closing Abiding Truth Ministries effective immediately,” Lively said, referring to rumors that Kennedy may not return to the bench next term.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has labeled Abiding Truth Ministries a “hate group.”

Lively played a role in the drafting of Uganda's notorious “kill the gays” bill, which called for life imprisonment for the crime of “aggravated homosexuality” and banned the “promotion of homosexuality.” In 2009, Lively traveled to Uganda on several occasions. During a 5-hour televised marathon presentation, Lively claimed that gay men and women were aggressively recruiting Uganda's children and labeled some gays “monsters … so far from normalcy that they're killers.”

Lively has also promoted the conspiracy theory that gay men are to blame for the Holocaust. “There is no question that homosexuality figures prominently in the history of the Holocaust,” he wrote in the 1996 edition of The Pink Swastika. “The first years of terrorism against the Jews were carried out by the homosexuals of the SA.”

Lively said Wednesday that he has not changed his views on sexual minorities but believes that his emphasis “should shift away from a culture-war perspective to a conservationist perspective in which the natural family is recognized as the essential eco-system of humanity that must be protected and preserved in the mainstream of society.”

“I expect to enlist authentically conservative homosexuals in this cause, as well as political liberals with natural law presuppositions on environmental and conservationist issues – especially regarding transgender extremism as it morphs into transhumanism, with all of its horrific science-fiction-come-to-life implications,” he added.

Republican Governor Charlie Baker, whom Lively hopes to replace in the GOP primary, has called Lively's views “outrageous.”