ST. PAUL – State Rep. Harry Niska, R-Ramsey, blasted Minnesota legislative Democrats on Friday for opening the door to treating pedophiles as a protected class in the state and funding a statewide speech registry while claiming otherwise.
Niska said ranking Democrats broke from the norm by omitting Republicans from a conference committee they appointed late last month to prepare for final passage a bill to fund the state’s public safety/judiciary budget in the next two-year cycle. The all-Democrat panel reached agreement on S.F. 2909 and publicly posted it around 2:30 a.m. Friday – with plans to conduct votes on final approval as soon as that same day.
Without Republicans in the room, Democrats stripped from the bill language Niska successfully amended – without opposition – to House File 2890. He said his amendment eliminated concerns language in the original bill could be interpreted as protecting pedophiles under the Human Rights Act, simply indicating "The physical or sexual attachment to children by an adult is not a protected class under this chapter.”
The all-Democrat conference committee stripped the Niska amendment without discussion, he said. Without his amendment, Niska said some may interpret the HRA to deem pedophilia as a protected class in Minnesota, which prevents them from being denied employment, housing, education and more.
“Part of our job as legislators is to anticipate misinterpretations of laws we create to head off potential problems,” Niska said. “My amendment received overwhelming bipartisan support as a solution to prevent very dangerous outcomes from occurring, but Democrats recklessly decided not to have this protection in law. They are putting politics ahead of kids and wearing ideological blinders instead of doing what’s right for Minnesotans.”
In addition, the all-Democrat conference committee made changes that make it appear a proposed statewide bias speech registry has been removed from the bill. Niska said that’s not the case, indicating the bill still provides funding to support staff and a database for creating a bias registry – but under a different name.
“They are pretending to fix the speech registry but are still funding it while using more vague language that refers to analyzing civil rights trends,” Niska said. “They are embarrassed because they can’t publicly defend their plan to create a new state-funded branch of thought police, so they have resorted to using misleading euphemisms while gaslighting the public. This is reckless, dishonest and shows why Minnesotans cannot trust this one-party, Democrat trifecta of rule in our state.”
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