Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee has resigned from his appointment as a board member of the Country Music Association Foundation.

Huckabee announced his resignation following an outcry from the Nashville music industry.

“I genuinely regret that some in the industry were so outraged by my appointment that they bullied the CMA and the Foundation with economic threats and vowed to withhold support for the programs for students if I remained,” Huckabee wrote in his resignation letter. “I’m somewhat flattered to be of such consequence when all I thought I was doing was voluntarily serving on a non-profit board without pay in order to [continue] my decades of advocacy for the arts and especially music.”

The CMA said that it had accepted Huckabee's resignation “effective immediately.”

Jason Owen was among those who protested Huckabee's appointment. The openly gay executive heads Monument Records and Sandbox Management, which represents country music stars such as Little Big Town, Faith Hill and Kacey Musgraves.

In a letter to CMA Foundation CEO Sarah Trahern, Owen, who is raising a family with his husband, said that he could “no longer support the CMA Foundation in any way.”

“This man has made it clear that my family is not welcome in his America. And the CMA has opened their arms to him, making him feel welcome and relevant,” Owen wrote. “Huckabee speaks of the sort of things that would suggest my family is morally beneath his and uses language that has a profoundly negative impact upon young people all across this country. Not to mention how harmful and damaging his deep involvement with the NRA is. What a shameful choice.”

Huckabee, an ordained Southern Baptist minister and a former presidential candidate, is an outspoken opponent of LGBT rights.

In October, 2014, he called on Republican governors to defy rulings striking down state laws and constitutional amendments that prohibited gay and lesbian couples from marrying. After the Supreme Court ruled that gay couples have a constitutional right to marry, Huckabee called on Christians to defy the nation's highest court, saying that they must be “willing to suffer” for their beliefs. As a presidential candidate, he pledged to ignore the ruling and protect opponents of marriage equality.

Huckabee has also called homosexuality a sin and is opposed to openly gay and transgender people serving in the military.