No beating around the bush by the Republican nominee for attorney general in North Carolina: The state’s new anti-LGBT law is about keeping North Carolina “straight.”

During a Monday rally in the state capital Raleigh with supporters of the law that keeps transgender people from using the public bathroom of their choice, state Sen. Buck Newton, the GOP nominee for attorney general, strayed from the typical conservative talking points about public safety.

“Go home, tell your friends and family who had to work today what this is all about and how hard we must fight to keep our state straight,” Newton told attendees at the rally, according to a video posted by Progress North Carolina Action.

Newton made the comments at a rally with other Republican state lawmakers for those support the new law in Raleigh.

“We all know that the folks that wave the rainbow flags and things like that are politically very upset about the way things are today. They’re upsets about the way things have always been in this state,” he said earlier in his remarks. “And they’re bound and determined to try to change it, whether it’s by winning elections in the city of Charlotte on their city council or whether it’s wining elections in November in the General Assembly or whether it’s winning elections in November for our governor.”

The state senator also said that the law was aimed at protecting women from predators in bathrooms, the talking point conservatives have used to justify the law.

“Now it’s been said that there are many, many, many, many more sexual predators on the sex offender list than there are transgender people,” he said. “And we can all feel sympathy for folks who are having difficult times, because we all know folks that have a difficult time, whether folks are struggling with drugs, are 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. But that does not mean that we should expose our wives and our sisters and our children to the sexual predators in the bathrooms.”