Tim Walz: Vulgarian Child Catcher?

In recent days the Twitter has launched many very stupid attacks about how Kamala Harris’s running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is bad, actually. They would not be so stupid if they were not so relentlessly false. But there you go. And now one more — which we would be remiss to leave uncovered — is the startling resemblance the right wingers have suddenly noticed between Tim Walz and The Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. (Ooh, you!)

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If you have looked at the pictures above, you may be confused as to just how severe is the presbyopia of Donald Trump and his allies. The attack that began on the periphery of the campaign was moved to the center when Trump, speaking in Bozeman, Montana, on Friday night, personally accused Walz of legalizing state kidnapping, presumably a reference to Minnesota’s HF 146, signed into law by Walz in April of last year. Trumps exact words were pretty bonkers:

Do we have any children here? Please close your ears. He ordered tampons in boy’s bathrooms. Okay. He signed a law letting the state kidnap children to change their gender.

Of course he did not sign a law permitting the state to kidnap children.

But wait! There’s there there, protested JD Vance in a Sunday interview with Jon Karl on ABC’s “This Week”:

KARL: [Trump] said that Walz has signed a letter letting the state kidnap children to change their… to change their gender and allowing pedophiles to be exempt from crimes. That’s not true. That’s not remotely true.

VANCE: Well, what President Trump said, and I haven’t watched the whole rally —

KARL: What he said was not true.

VANCE: What President Trump said, Jon, is that Tim Walz has supported taking children from their parents if their parents don’t consent to gender reassignment. That is crazy. […]

KARL: He has not signed a law allowing the state to kidnapping children to change their sexual identity

VANCE: What I just explained to you, I would describe as kidnapping, Jon.

Good grief. And so it has now become necessary to explain exactly what this law does, which is

1. Render out-of-state subpoenas unenforceable in the state if the subpoena relates to gender-related medical services accessed in Minnesota that are legal in Minnesota,

2. Mandates that Minnesota decline to extradite someone on out-of-state criminal charges if the charges are leveled on the basis that someone accessed gender-related medical services in Minnesota that are legal in Minnesota,

3. Mandates that Minnesota decline to follow a court order from another state purporting to remove a child from the custody of a parent or guardian within Minnesota if the sole basis for the order is that the child accessed in Minnesota gender-related medical services that are legal in Minnesota,

4. Specifies some very inside-baseball rules about when a case can be heard in Minnesota and be decided by a judge within the state, if it relates to a child in the state accessing gender-related medical care that is legal in Minnesota but illegal in the child’s home state.

That’s it. There is no authorization to remove children from a parent’s custody in this law that wasn’t already present in Minnesota law. At worst, when a family law judge — judges who, in every state, are required to decide cases consistent with the best interests of a child — decides a case between two parents who disagree on the best interests of their child, or between an out-of-state parent and an older teen with the requisite competence to plead for emancipation with enough credibility that a court takes the petition seriously, the judge who makes the best-interest decision will sometimes be a Minnesota judge, when previously the case might have been handed off to an out-of-state judge. Some parents might also find it upsetting that a custodial parent or guardian can’t have their child removed solely because they consented to medical treatment for their child that the out-of-state parent doesn’t like, but those situations come before family courts every day.

Walz did nothing radical and signed nothing radical in this bill. Red states want to make it illegal for their residents or former residents to access certain health care options when those people are in other states, when those options are entirely legal in other states. Idaho did that with abortion, Missouri and Texas (and probably others) have attempted to do the same with gender-related medical care. But that’s not how laws work, that’s not how jurisdiction works, and that’s not how kidnapping works.

[ABC News]

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