“Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.”
What does it mean to “identify as Black?” Or who belongs to a group known as “other than white Latino(s)” and is it good or bad to be excluded from it or included in it?
These are but the beginning of questions judges will be answering for the next decade as aggrieved individuals – that is, those who are not included in the grievance groups identified in the discriminatory language of 2023’s statutes – will argue in endless lawsuits.
Below find a table of remarkable new legal terms that are now part of Minnesota’s legal lexicon. These terms are included in a single bill recently passed by the DFL-controlled legislature. Gov. Walz gleefully and with great celebration signed them into law.
As I read CCR2995, the legislative conference report of the Health and Human Services (HHS) Omnibus Bill, I realized that discrimination is anything but dead in Minnesota. The bill carves out special benefits for individuals and organizations based on a variety of “traits.” If you qualify in one or more of those categories, you could reap an abundance of special programs that spend tens of millions of dollars on your grievances.
For instance, if you “identify as Black, or African American,” and are queer, or more specifically, asexual and a birthing parent, you might find eight or ten programs the legislature just created to serve your desires – or needs.
But if you do not fit one of those categories, that is, if you insist on calling yourself a white pregnant woman, or a person who claims to be a man from the moment his mother gave birth to him, and heterosexual, you will be denied access to a wide range of benefits created by the 2023 legislature.
For entertainment, I wrote to the chief counsel in the State Senate and asked him to provide the statutory definition of “African American.” As you can easily understand, such a definition is critical when carving out benefits that accrue only to a portion of individuals who “identify as black.” The lawyer dodged the answer, sending me to three other lawyers who worked on the HHS bill. His excuse? He focused on law enforcement legislation. The other three lawyers have yet to respond.
I am certain that a review of all the bills passed in 2023 would reveal a consistent use of terms such as those below. Their use alone, in that they establish artificial lines of distribution based on color, ethnicity, artificial and/or real preferences, is troubling.
We have strived for generations to put discrimination aside, and in so doing, turned the other way when patently discriminatory affirmative action laws were used to end discrimination in a variety of settings. Just when we thought we had made progress, along comes a shopping list of grievance groups who apparently need protection from whites who believe in and practice biological science.
Which brings me to my point. The following words have now passed muster as included in the legal lexicon of the State of Minnesota. (See the “afternote” about the definition of abortion.) Without an attempt to define them, at least in the HHS bill, they have now given legal authority to government agencies to divide up your tax dollars, and assault your liberty, to create more discrimination and division in our state.
Which one is your favorite?
Someone else should do a similar search of other department bills (or all bills) the DFL passed this year. How many other nebulous, undefined words have become part of our legal lexicon?
Soon, a person who does not qualify for a benefit because he/she/they identify as LGBTQI+ and not simply LGBTQ will be denied a benefit. I imagine they will need to prove to the court that they are Q (queer) and something else. Or, what is more likely, the 2024 legislature will pass a bill attempting to fix this legal language quagmire. They will have to admit that they cannot possibly define the thousands of variations claimed by these individuals and groups who seize on a “legal right” to discriminate against white people and, presumably, some Asians.
What is needed, of course, is a lawsuit that challenges the various forms of legal discrimination in these new laws, and forces the State of Minnesota to defend the terms that are nowhere defined in legal statute.
Redefining abortion
Might as well show you the language. This is the affected statute. Note that the words that are not underlined or struck are already in the statute. The words that are lined out were dropped from the law, and those underlined replace them.
Sec. 52. Minnesota Statutes 2022, section 145.411, subdivision 5, is amended to read:
Subd. 5. Abortion. “Abortion” includes an act, procedure or use of any instrument, medicine or drug which is supplied or prescribed for or administered to a pregnant woman an individual with the intention of terminating, and which results in the termination of, pregnancy.
With this, the DFL continues its war on women, working to eliminate reference to them and replace them with their wildest imaginations of words to describe human behaviors.
Dave Racer
Dave Racer, MLitt, is an author, publisher, commentator, and teacher. He has 22 books about health care to his credit as author, co-author, or editor.
