by Steve Timmer

Feb 25, 2026, 9:00 PM

Suffer the little children

There is a bill in the Minnesota House of Representatives, HF 1434 (it has a Senate companion) that would require internet websites to conduct age verification of eighteen – adulthood – before accessing the site if it is ‘harmful to minors.’ Rep. Walter Hudson (R, Discount Shopping) is one of the authors of the bill. A website would be required under the bill to use a third-party age verification service to confirm the majority status of a user attempting to access the site. Whether such services exist or are available to website creators, at a reasonable cost, or any cost, or are remotely accurate, are separate questions. Moreover, if you are an adult who, for whatever reason, is not in the verification database, or one doesn’t exist, your First Amendment rights would be denied, too.

Query also whether we want to encourage a data broker to amass and offer for sale a database of every person in the state to permit the determination of whether an individual has achieved majority age or not.

In Australia, the Aussie church ladies like Wally Hundson passed an age (16) verification bill for the creation of social media accounts. It has been a spectacular, laughable and unenforceable failure. The under-sixteen kids are the loudest laughers.

The bill is cloaked as a protection of minors from pornography, but its sweep is much broader than that. The bill’s use of the term ‘with respect to minors’ appears frequently: be ‘patently offensive’ to; ‘appeal to prurient interest’ of, etc. In your average teenager, I am not sure there is much difference between ‘prurient interest’ and ordinary adolescent curiosity. In fact, I know there isn’t.

We won’t ask the kids about offense or prurience, either. It’ll be their controlling parents or people like Wally Hudson.

Medical and some academic sites devoted to a discussion of sexuality and gender could easily fall afoul of this vague bill. (HF 1434 probably also violates the federal Constitution’s Interstate Commerce Clause, but that’s the least of its problems.)

DFL Rep. Leigh Fink, a member of the House’s Commerce Committee (why was this clunker first heard in the Commerce Committee?), where the bill was heard on February 19^th, raised questions about depriving young people of information they might not be able to get from other sources. Rep. Walter Hudson, as stated, one of the authors of the bill, but not on the committee, made one of his charming, disparaging X, nee Twitter, videos about Fink’s remarks, and in another post on X said of Fink, “This dude is disgusting.” Most of you know that Leigh Fink is a trans woman.

This all puts me in mind of a school recollection of mine; one that remains vivid to me.

In junior high, in the little town where I grew up, we were tasked with delivering a speech about a hobby of ours. I chose keeping – and breeding – tropical fish. (Guppies and other live bearers were easy, but egg-laying fish, like Bettas, were another matter entirely.)

I was explaining, probably in painful detail, about the fertilization of eggs laid by the female fish, when a hand shot up. It belonged to the daughter of one of the conservative preachers in town. She asked, “What’s sperm?”

I could hear the teacher’s chair scrape on the wooden floor behind me, and I waited a moment, but she didn’t say anything, although I’m sure she was poised for action. So, my twelve- or thirteen-year-old self proceeded, as best I could, to give my classmate her first lesson in the birds and the bees.

After class, the teacher said to me, “Nice job.” I got a good grade on the speech.

When my adult self reflects on this memory, I think about how screwed up it was that a girl, on the cusp of puberty, was entirely, utterly, ignorant about biological reproduction. And never mind human sexuality. That’s what her parents obviously wanted. If you are a child who questions their sexual attraction or gender identity in an environment like this, well, good luck.

At least now, they have the internet. People like Wally Hudson want to take that away from kids. It isn’t a question of protection; it is a question of control. Wally and his fellow travelers are, at base, bug-eyed control freaks: they want to raise kids – not only their kids, everybody’s kids – to be just like them. Because most of the time, it’s the way they were raised, in authoritarian homes. They’ve lived it so long that it is just comfortable. They’ve gone from being told what to do to telling people what to do.

This desire is apparent in every Republican impulse. You see it when Wally tells DFL supporters of reproductive freedom that they are going to hell. You see it when Republican legislators try to siphon off as much money as possible from public schools to support places where little Johnnie and Janie won’t be exposed to ideas other than the ‘right’ ones. You can even see it in the failed attempt to destroy the Minnesota Constitution’s Education Clause’s mandate of equal and efficient public schools. Or to want to maintain segregated, publicly-financed schools.

This list is hardly exhaustive.

Wally Hudson is the perfect spittle-flecked avatar for the mentality we must take on, head on. Kids can be harmed by pornography, to be sure, but they can also be harmed by being unable to answer their questions about sexuality, sexual attraction, or gender dysphoria.

Imagine being a gay child, or one questioning gender identity, in Wally’s house. Or maybe as Paul Gazelka or Elon Musk’s child. Or even being sent to Marcus Bachmann to be straightened out. An internet that tells you that you aren’t a freak might be a lifeline.

I believe in the agency of children, especially teenagers. They need to be helped, guided, and protected, but not controlled.

HF 1434 provides that it is to be enforced by the Minnesota Attorney General. I am comforted by the fact that the last Republican attorney general left office on January 4, 1971, but I am dismayed by the fact that the bill would also create a private right of action for parents, who could sue for a civil penalty of up to $25,000 (without, apparently, proof of actual damage) and attorney’s fees. In conservative reaches of the state, like Albertville, which Wally represents in the Legislature, the case is probably not a heavy lift.

After the hearing on the 19^th, the Commerce Committee did not vote HF 1434 up or down; it is still in the committee. It could hear it again, vote up or down on it, pass it on to another committee, or just lay it over for inclusion in a log-rolling omnibus bill. Further positive action is obviously what Wally Hudson is lobbying for.

If you agree with me about HF 1434, you ought to contact your legislators and members of the Commerce Committee. That’s true of the companion bill on the Senate side, SF 2105, too. That bill has two DFL authors, Sens. John Hoffman and Judy Seeberger.

Tell them that the bill, in anything close to its current form, will deny and chill the exercise of First Amendment rights for both minors and adults, including in a vulnerable population of minors who need them.