Senator Scott Brown (R-MA) was the only member of Massachusetts’ congressional delegation absent from their It Gets Better video supporting LGBTQ youth, released Wednesday. Senator Brown, a Republican who won the seat of the late Democratic Party icon, Ted Kennedy, voted against Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal before he finally voted for it. Brown was invited but snubbed John Kerry, Ed Markey, Nina Tsongas, John Tierney, Jim McGovern, Bill Keating, Steven Lynch, Richard Neal, John Olver, Mike Capuano, and Barney Frank, an openly-gay Congressman, who at the end says, “It will get better. It will get better because you’re helping it to become better, and this is going to be, in the end, the kind of world we all want to live in.”
Perhaps Brown does not believe in helping it to become better?
READ:Â Why A Vote For Scott Brown Is A Vote Against LGBTQ Rights
Brown, whose DADT vote was a turning point, as he was elected on a supposed “common man” who still serves in the National Guard, is seen as a conundrum on LGBT issues, though his record is clearly anti-gay.
The Huffington Post’s Amanda Terkel reports, “In the past, Massachusetts gay rights groups have been skeptical of Brown, the only Republican in the state’s congressional delegation, pointing to anti-LGBT comments he has made in the past. He once said, for example, that the idea of two women having a child is “just not normal.” In 2006, he was the only state senator to vote to uphold then-Gov. Mitt Romney’s veto of a Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth.”
Brown has voted over 25 times against marriage equality, and unless he’s changed his mind since 2010, is on record as opposing the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), and on record as opposing ENDA, and did not support a Transgender Civil Rights and Hate Crimes bill, according to Arline Isaacson, Co-​Chair of Massachusetts Gay and Lesbian Political Caucus.