North Carolina State Senator Buck Newton on Monday addressed a crowd of HB2 supporters, urging them to continue fighting to keep the anti-LGBT law alive. He ended his speech by revealing the true purpose of HB2: "Keep our state straight!," Newton demanded.

"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, a Republican running to be North Carolina's next Attorney General, told fans.

"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," he told the crowd earlier in his speech. "They’re upsets about the way things have always been in this state. 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."...

"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."