Headlines vs. Reality: Preserving Civil Rights
Second plank in the GOP platform is "Preserve Civil Rights." Let's get into it.
Some of this I don't have a problem with. Requiring care for infants born alive during an abortion, recognizing there are biological differences between males and females, condemning antisemitism, fine. Nothing there to argue about.
Then you hit the part about only counting U.S. citizens in the census. That sounds reasonable until you think about what the census actually does. It decides how many roads get built, how many hospital beds a region gets funded for, how school aid gets split up. Undercount an area on purpose and you shortchange the people who actually live there, citizen or not. That's not a technicality. That's real money and real services.
Then there's a resolution I want to walk through carefully, because the platform gets misread on this one, including, at first, by me. It gives minors, or their parents on their behalf, the right to bring a civil lawsuit against doctors, clinics, and counselors who provided them transition-related medical treatment. That's what it says. It's not about schools. It's not about anybody performing procedures in a classroom. It's a liability provision aimed at medical providers.
Here's my actual problem with it: malpractice law already lets a patient sue a provider who harmed them. So either this provision does something malpractice law doesn't already cover. In which case I'd like someone to explain what, or it's there to make a specific kind of medical care legally radioactive for any doctor willing to provide it, regardless of whether that care was appropriate. I've spent time looking for cases showing kids getting these treatments without their parents' knowledge or consent, and I haven't found them. If someone has real examples, I'm open to hearing it. But writing a law aimed at a problem nobody can point to isn't protecting kids. It's scaring parents.
I'll be straight with you: I don't have all the answers on how someone comes to be trans, or why medical treatment differs case to case. I'm not going to pretend I do. What I do know is that the people best positioned to make that call are a kid's own parents and their doctor, not a state legislator writing platform language.
Keep going and you hit the "Woman's Right to Know" law; information women get before an abortion. No problem with giving people information. But there's no matching right to choose in this platform. Support for the right to health information, apparently, only runs one direction.
Then there's the Statement of Principles: government should treat all citizens equally under the law. I'd like that to mean something. It's harder to square with the same platform supporting ICE enforcement actions against people already living and working here.
And here's where it gets specific. This platform commits Minnesota to "cooperate with any federal investigation" into our voter rolls. That's not abstract right now. The U.S. Attorney General has already sent our governor a letter demanding our unredacted voter data, and she sent it the same weekend federal immigration agents shot and killed a man in Minneapolis. State attorneys have called it an attempt to force the state's hand using the ICE operation as leverage. Whatever you think of the ICE fight, handing our voter rolls to Washington on cue isn't "election integrity."
Equal treatment under the law sounds good in the headline. The specifics tell you who it actually applies to, and who's being pressured to comply.
Last thing, and I want to handle this one on its own: the right to bear arms. I own guns. I hunt. I'm not looking to take anyone's gun away. But this platform expands gun rights. No registration, no permit needed, broader legal cover for using deadly force — while offering nothing on the other side for kids getting shot in schools. You can believe in the right to life and still ask what we're doing to protect kids sitting in a classroom. Right now the answer is nothing. I'll have more to say on this specific issue in a future post, because it deserves its own space, not a paragraph at the end of somebody else's.
Brian Walker
