Republished with permission from Right Wing Watch.

Right-wing activists are rallying behind Florida state Rep. Charles Van Zant, the GOP politician who warned that Common Core will turn children gay.

Van Zant pointed to Florida’s education contract with American Institutes for Research (AIR), a group that produces material focusing on LGBT youth. Those materials, however, are not part of the contract with Florida, and in any case it would be absurd to claim that LGBT-inclusive resources would “attract every one of your children to become as homosexual,” as Van Zant did.

In an email alert today, an alliance of Tea Party and Religious Right groups called the Florida Stop Common Core Coalition told its members to “thank Rep. Van Zant for his courageous stand” for “correctly call[ing] out AIR’s social engineering agenda.”

“Representative Van Zant was completely correct in his statements that AIR is promoting the GLBT lifestyle in children, and they are doing the same within families and churches,” wrote Dr. Karen Effrem, the coalition’s executive director. The group criticized “AIR's blatant promotion of the GLBT lifestyle,” including its “full blown promotion of these sexual practices in families, churches, and society at large.”

Florida Eagle Forum also blasted AIR for having “a significant history of promoting identification of the GLBT lifestyle for children as young as seven years old.”

Raymond Johnson of Biblical Concepts Ministries wrote in a press release today that Van Zant “spoke the truth” with his Common Core comments and thanked him for standing “against the onslaught of the radical LGBT agenda.” Johnson cites a satirical Michael Swift essay about gay people using the schools to “sodomize your sons.”