In the latest outlandish accusation against the Common Core — the education standards promoted by the Obama administration — a Florida Republican said he believes the Common Core standards will turn kids gay.
The remarks were made at an anti-Common Core event in March and posted by the liberal blog Think Progress on Monday.
Republican State Rep. Charles Van Zant said the group implementing the Common Core in Florida, American Institutes for Research (AIR), “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,” Zant said. “But you need to know.”
AIR is a non-profit, non-partisan group.
Conservatives have exploded over the implementation of Common Core in recent months. Glenn Beck has dubbed the educational standards “evil” and said they were designed to “Train us to be a serf state” under the rule of China and Islam. Common Core is not a nationalized curriculum as many have alleged but instead lays out a set of standards students must meet at each grade level. Conservatives particularly have protested the federal government’s influence on local classrooms; still others worry about the cost of implementation, the way the standards were written, and the untested curriculums the schools are now purchasing to cater to the tests. More than a dozen states have legislation pending that could repeal the standards. A message left at the representative’s Capitol office was not returned by press time.
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