Finding the devil in legislative details

This is a story I wrote for the excellent site Wokespy. The site a great pit-stop for up to date quick hits on the worst of woke from around the country. I hope you’ll check it out. This is a longer piece I wrote that drops the humor in order to explain a concept that affects all of our lives, but that most don’t know very much about.

I spent 20 years learning how to draft, interpret, and explain legislation as part of my job as a consumer advocate. What I’d like to help you understand is how laws are written and constructed, and how what looks like “boring fine print” can entirely change your legal landscape in astonishing ways.

-Josh

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Devilish Details: Tim Walz’s Pro-Pedo Bill

Now that Kamala Harris has picked Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her vice-presidential running mate, we have a chance to look at Walz’s legislative record to see what the man really wants.

More on that below, but first we have to prepare the ground to understand what’s at stake. Most people have no idea how much devilry springs from the writing of laws. Few have the time or the knowledge to read bills and proposed regulations down to the level of detail necessary to understand what the law will really do.

Some of this is just the nature of legislative sausage-making. Even with the best efforts of drafters, effective legal language is sometimes going to be hard to understand. Your faithful correspondent used to specialize in reading and drafting proposed consumer protection laws, and it took time to translate these into plain English so both citizens and lawmakers understood exactly what they were being asked to consider.

But the complication and confusion is sometimes by design. Activists know that not one in 10,000 citizens will read a bill all the way through, let alone carefully parse the definitions of terms used in the bill. Almost all legislation has a “definitions” section at the beginning. It’s a mini-dictionary. This section is necessary because the way lawmakers define common words in legislation is often different from the way regular people use those words.

“Statutory construction” is the process drafters use to structure laws so that they convey their intended meaning and do not conflict with other existing laws.

For example, pretend there’s a bill to regulate the exhaust coming out of car tail pipes. The proposed law is meant to govern only passenger cars, not utility vehicles like tractor-trailers or farm equipment. The bill would define “automobile” in a way that would read like this:

Automobile—a mechanized four-wheel conveyance powered by an internal combustion engine that is used for private non-commercial transportation of not more than eight passengers on ordinary roadways. For the purposes of this bill, the term ‘automobile’ shall not include conveyances such as buses, tractor trailers, utility trucks or motorcycles, or vehicles used exclusively to perform earth-moving or farm work.

Now that you understand that, it will be easier to see the devil buried in the definitional details of a law signed by Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. The Republican National Committee’s “RNCResearch” Twitter/X account highlighted it:

Here is the bill’s language. Text that is stricken through will be deleted from the law. Text that is underlined will be added to the law.

Notice what the RNC is pointing out. The bill deliberately removed language that would exclude pedophilia from the definition of sexual orientation. Put another way, the bill now considers pedophilic attractions to be a “sexual orientation” in the same way that being straight or gay is a sexual orientation.

What will be the effect? Because the law governs what Minnesota calls “human rights,” and because the law bans what it calls mistreatment or discrimination based on sexual orientation, pedophiles are now legally protected from “discrimination.” Under the old law, it would be illegal for a business to fire an employee who was gay. But under the new law, it would also now be illegal for a business to fire an employee who admitted he was attracted to children.

Say a toy store found an employee with explicit child images on his social media. Naturally recognizing that such a person likely poses a risk to children in the store, the toy company wants to remove this employee. But now it can’t, because Tim Walz’s Minnesota says that’s an illegal act against the pedophile. So “Chester molester” gets to continue selling toys to children because the store will be prosecuted if it tries to protect its young customers from a possible predator.

If you want a look at how radical Tim Walz’s progressive leftist policies really are, there is plenty out there.

When it comes to this bill, the good news is that many social media users appear to see what it’s really about:

But prepare to get angry. The left is so insistent on enacting its diabolical agenda that activists are disputing that this law is real. They are telling lies that are easy to disprove while calling people who are alarmed by the truth “MAGA cultists.”

It is Gene Trevino’s claims that are false. He is citing the removed and deleted section of the law that protected children, and falsely claiming that this protective section still exists. It does not. That was the entire point of the bill Walz signed, to remove that protection. You can confirm this for yourself by reading the law directly on the Minnesota Legislature’s Website.

Keep your guard up, readers. The devil is in the details, and he is ravenously hungry.

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