Florida State Legislator: Common Core Will Gay Your Kids Up So Bad

We think the Common Core educational standards are just about the greatest thing to come along in years. Not because we're especially in love with them as a set of education standards, but because of the way they've become the biggest Monster Under the Bed for paranoid wingnuts since Obamacare. Common Core makes for an even better target upon which to project Culture War fears, since almost anything can be billed as a dire threat to Our Precious Children. Case study for today: Florida State Rep. Charles Van Zant, who warned that Common Core is nothing less than an insidious plot to turn your children gay and probably make them major in Art History, too.

Speaking at an anti-Common Core jamboree in March that's just now getting attention, Van Zant (do we need to say he's a Republican? OK, there, we said it) explained that in implementing Common Core, education officials in Florida -- a group well known to be subversive, we guess -- have given a contract to American Institutes for Research (AIR) to score the state's standardized tests. AIR, he claims, is "promoting as hard as they can any youth that is interested in the LGBT agenda.” Evidence? Why would he want to give any evidence? Everybody knows the Government schools are just indoctrination factories anyway, what with all the socialist math and hardcore pornography they assign students to read.

In his talk, Van Zant warns that AIR is recruiting children to become gay, and bragging about it on their website -- "just click the link to what they're doing with youth and you will see what their agenda is!" Of course, there is no link to "what we're doing with youth," but it does appear that the organization is supportive of LGBT kids, which is exactly the same as pushing kids to become gay, because that totally works anyway.

Van Zant also ominously states that they "even name it '2-S,' which they define as having two spirits. The Bible says a lot about being double minded." Of course, he doesn't explain a bit of that, but thanks to a bit of searching, we suppose Van Zant is talking about this document or something like it; of course, "two-spirit" isn't a blanket term for gay people at all; it's a term used to refer to variant gender roles in Native American communities, and we suppose it's also been broadened into a sort of New-Agey term for "people what just refuse to acknowledge male/female gender identities like God wants them to." What Van Zant is actually freaking out about is nothing more than an attempt to create the most inclusive acronym possible: "LGBTQI2-S," which stands for "lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, intersex and/or two-spirit." There's your vast gay plot: the inclusion of a bit of jargon in one testing company's website (and in a project that's completely unrelated to the scoring it will be doing for Florida schools) is definitely proof of a gay recruitment agenda throughout Common Core.

And so we get to the money quote, which Van Zant is sorry to have to let everyone know about: "I really hate to bring you that news, but you need to know”:

These people, that will now receive $220 million from the state of Florida unless this is stopped, will promote double-mindedness in state education and attract every one of your children to become as homosexual as they possibly can. I’m sorry to report that to you.

So yes, America, Common Core is going to infiltrate the schools with rampant homosexxing, because one company that will be scoring tests also does work with LGBT youth. Here's the video, which is sort of an amazing example of how one microscopic bit of "evidence" can get blown into a massive plot to destroy America. Death panels, anyone? At the very least, we'd like to congratulate Rep. Van Zant for richly earning his nomination for Wonkette's coveted legislative Shitmuffin of the Year Award.

[ ThinkProgress ]

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