One of Minnesota’s congressional delegation was recently caught repeating the tired old lie that churches and religious leaders could be persecuted under a federal hate crimes bill currently before congress that would expand the definition of a hate crime to include gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, and disability. PolitiFact, a Pulitzer Prize-winning website that fact-checks public figures’ statements, evaluated GOP Rep. John Kline’s charge that “any pastor, preacher, priest, rabbi or imam who gives a sermon out of their moral traditions about sexual practices could be found guilty of a federal crime.”

The verdict? False. These kinds of scare tactics – conflating hate speech and violent acts, and ignoring an individual’s free speech rights – have been used in the past to sap our neighbors’ support for laws recognizing the heinousness of a crime motivated by the victim’s identity.

Kline represents the unlucky residents of the southern suburbs of the Twin Cities — Carver, Scott, Le Sueur, Dakota, Rice, and Goodhue Counties.