North Carolina State Senator Buck
Newton on Monday delivered a speech in which he made a call to “keep
our state straight.”
Newton is currently campaigning to be
the state's next attorney general.
Supporters and opponents of the state's
controversial House Bill 2 clashed on Monday, holding competing
rallies as lawmakers returned to work.
(Related: 54
demonstrators arrested protesting anti-gay law as North Carolina
lawmakers convene.)
At a rally in support of the measure,
which prohibits transgender people from using the bathroom of their
choice at public institutions and blocks cities from enacting LGBT
protections, Newton repeated the unsubstantiated claims of
supporters.
“We all know folks that had a
difficult time. Whether folks are struggling with drugs or
struggling with their marriages, figuring out what it is that they're
supposed to be doing in life, we can all have sympathy for that,”
Newton is seen telling the crowd in a video recorded by Progress
North Carolina Action. “But that does not mean that we should
expose our wives and our sisters and our children to the sexual
predators in the bathrooms. We must say no. We must say no.”
“Go home, tell your friends and
family who had to work today what this is all about and how hard we
had to fight to keep our state straight,” he
later added.
State Democrats have called on Newton
to apologize.
“One of the Republican sponsors of HB
2 just admitted the real purpose of the law: to make North Carolina
unwelcoming to LGBT people,” said a spokesman for the North
Carolina Democratic Party.