A clip from 2017 resurfaced this week, revealing Democratic Governor Tim Walz talking openly about young children receiving transgender care and using any bathroom of their choice.
“In many cases, these are children my son’s age, a 4th-grader, a 10-year-old, who just want to go to the bathroom, and their identity is, they are male or female, and they just go in that bathroom and use it,” Walz said in the old clip.
Walz also signed a law last year that changed the definition of “sexual orientation.”
The new definition under the “Take Pride Act” included pedophiles in the state’s Human Rights Act.
The old version of the law explicitly did not include pedophiles as a protected “sexual orientation.”
“‘Sexual orientation’ does not include a physical or sexual attachment to children by an adult,” the law previously read.
As of May 2023, Minnesota defined “sexual orientation” as “whom someone is, or is perceived of as being, emotionally, physically, or sexually attracted to based on sex or gender identity. A person may be attracted to men, women, both, neither, or to people who are genderqueer, androgynous, or have other gender identities.”
Transgender Rep. Leigh Fink introduced the bill last year. Fink told Fox News that the bill “updates outdated language that incorrectly ties pedophilia to a person’s sexual orientation.”
“Nothing in the bill changes or weakens any crimes against children, or the state’s ability to prosecute those who break the law,” Finke added. “Of course, pedophilia is not a sexual orientation. The language never should have been included in the statutory definition in the first place. Crimes against children are located in Minnesota’s criminal statutes, and again, they remain unchanged.”
Minnesota State Representative Harry Niska (R) said at the time of the bill’s passage that Democrats put “politics ahead of kids and wearing ideological blinders instead of doing what’s right for Minnesotans.”
