Gay Republican Richard Tisei, who is running for Congress and was the GOP's nominee for Massachusetts lieutenant governor in 2010, says he's sitting out the state GOP convention because its platform is anti-gay, the Boston Globe reports:
“I don't want to go and be seen in any way to be endorsing that,” said Tisei, who is gay and who got married last summer. “I don't really feel comfortable being at a convention where the platform takes the party backward, rather than forward, as far as appealing to a large group of Massachusetts voters.”
The platform that was overwhelmingly approved by state committee members frowns on abortion and gay marriage, social issues that the GOP in Massachusetts had previously avoided addressing, for fear of alienating the state's many liberal and libertarian-minded voters.
