ST. PAUL – State Rep. Harry Niska, R-Ramsey, blasted Minnesota Democrats for opening the door to treating pedophiles as a protected class in the state and funding a statewide speech registry while claiming otherwise.
Niska’s objections center on a pair of issues related to an omnibus public safety/judiciary package (S.F. 2909) Democrats in the House and Senate both approved Monday as part of the state’s next two-year budget, despite bipartisan opposition in the House.
Niska said ranking Democrats broke from the norm by omitting Republicans from a conference committee they appointed late last month to prepare the bill for final approval. Without Republicans in the room, Democrats stripped language Niska successfully amended to the bill – on a 126-0 vote – prior to preliminary passage. Niska said his amendment eliminated concerns language in the package could be interpreted as protecting pedophiles under the Human Rights Act, indicating "The physical or sexual attachment to children by an adult is not a protected class under this chapter.”
The all-Democrat conference committee struck 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 conference committee made changes to the bill Niska said may appear to remove a proposed statewide bias speech registry. To the contrary, Niska indicated 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.”
The bill is now in the hands of Gov. Tim Walz for enactment.
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