- The Texas GOP platform calls being gay "abnormal" and says Biden wasn't "legitimately elected."
- Sen. Rick Scott said the language wasn't "inclusive" and acknowledged Biden's win.
- A gay Republican group also slammed the Texas GOP for barring them from the convention.
Sen. Rick Scott on Wednesday criticized the decision of the Republican Party of Texas to formally call homosexuality "an abnormal lifestyle choice" in its new platform.
"My experience is, you know, the Republican Party is inclusive. And so I don't — I wouldn't have supported that, what they did," Scott, a Republican from Florida, told reporters when asked about the state party's stance on homosexuality, according to The Associated Press.
The new party platform was adopted over the weekend during the party's convention in Houston. In the "Homosexuality and Gender Issues" section, it says being gay is "an abnormal lifestyle choice" and that "we oppose any criminal or civil penalties against those who oppose homosexuality out of faith, conviction, or belief in traditional values."
There is also a section on gender identity that says "we oppose all efforts to validate transgender identity," among other stances.
Scott was governor of Florida when a shooting at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, left 49 people dead. Gay rights advocates said that Scott's aides at the time promised he would sign an executive order barring discrimination against LGBTQ state workers and contractors, but such an order never came to fruition.
Scott was also criticized by LGBTQ groups earlier this year when he published a platform that they said denied the existence of transgender people. "Humans are born male and female, there are two genders, and to deny that is to deny science," the platform said.
Before the new Texas GOP platform was adopted, the Log Cabin Republicans of Fort Worth, a gay Republican group, said they were not allowed to have a booth at the Texas Republican Party Convention.
"It's clear that inclusion wins, which makes the Texas Republican Party leadership's decision to exclude the Texas Log Cabin Republicans from their convention not just narrow-minded, but politically short-sighted," Charles Moran, the group's president, said in a statement.
The Texas GOP platform also said President Joe Biden was "not legitimately elected," cementing adherence to the false claim that the 2020 election was significantly impacted by fraud and that President Donald Trump had actually won.
A representative for Scott and the Texas GOP did not immediately respond to Insider's requests for comment.