Fox News host Mark Levin ranted against Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate Tim Walz on his August 14 radio show over false claims that the Minnesota governor passed a “law that gives civil right protections to pedophiles.” 

Levin is seemingly referring to a bill that incorporated new LGBTQ protections into the Minnesota Human Rights Act. The bill updates language about gender identity and makes it a violation to discriminate against people based on their gender identities in housing and education. Additionally, the bill removed the following outdated language from the previous statutory definition of sexual orientation: “‘Sexual orientation’ does not include a physical or sexual attachment to children by an adult.”

In 2023, a right-wing, anti-LGBTQ narrative spread in part by the anti-trans group Gays Against Groomers framed this change as creating a protected class for perpetrators of child sexual assault. One of the bill’s co-authors, Minnesota state Rep. Leigh Finke, pointed out this narrative was false. “Nothing in the bill changes or weakens any crimes against children, or the state's ability to prosecute those who break the law,” Finke said. “Of course, pedophilia is not a sexual orientation – which is why the language never should have been included in the statutory definition in the first place.” 

PolitiFact interviewed multiple legal scholars who supported this interpretation of the bill. For example, University of Southern California constitutional law professor David B. Cruz said that it would be “inconceivable” that the scope of protections based on sexual orientation and gender-identity would be expanded by the law to include pedophiles. Similarly, Brian Soucek, a law professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law, told PolitiFact, “No court in the country has or would ever say that a law protecting people from discrimination based on their sexual orientation extends to protecting pedophilia.”

Now, Levin and other right-wing media figures have picked up this false narrative from 2023 to attack Walz after Harris chose him as her running mate.