California Keeps Protecting Child Predators

thefederalist.com

Editor’s note: This article discusses mature themes.

If the police caught you with child porn or an actual naked child, but you still yearn for a seat on your local school board, the California legislature wants you to live your dream. Real headlines in the news this week:

The effort to ban registered sex offenders from running for office began with a registered sex offender in Fresno proudly announcing his campaign for city council. Rene Campos kicked off his campaign with a press conference across the street from a school, forcing Californians to notice that he could run for office. Here’s his profile on the Megan’s Law website:

Assemblywoman Esmeralda Soria, a Democrat who represents Fresno, promptly introduced a bill to bar all registered sex offenders from running for office, and the California Assembly passed AB 2753 in May. Sixty legislators voted for the bill in the lower house, and twenty declined to vote, but no one voted against it.

Then it reached the California Senate, where Scott Wiener chairs the elections committee. If you don’t know who Scott Wiener is, this image will begin to tell you how the story ends.

Wiener, the leading candidate for the seat in the House currently held by the retiring Nancy Pelosi, has a long history of legislating to protect adults who have “oral and anal intercourse” with minors and expressing pride in California’s commitment to the sexual liberation of young children.

In a committee hearing this week, Wiener steered a maneuver to kill Soria’s bill, pronouncing it unfair and dangerous. In a democracy, Wiener told an interviewer, people get to run for office, even people with “a lot of flaws.”

But the same committee did vote to advance a bill from another Democrat in the Assembly, the relentlessly dull-minded Dawn Addis, that also proposed to forbid registered sex offenders from running for office. The difference between the bill from Soria that was killed and the bill from Addis that was advanced: The bill from Addis, AB 2691, only covers people added to the sex offender registry for sex crimes against adult victims, explicitly excluding convictions related to sections of the penal code that refer to the sexual assault of minors:

(B) “Sexual assault” does not include a violation of subdivision (b) of Section 286, subdivision (b) of Section 287, or subdivision (h) or (i) of Section 289 of the Penal Code.

Greg Burt, a vice president at the California Family Council, spoke as a witness at the hearing and blasted the exclusion of sex crimes against children from Addis’ bill. You can watch that testimony in the video excerpt posted by another state legislator:

Celebrating the death of the bill that would have prevented him from (unsuccessfully) running for office, Campos told journalists that the legislature had delivered a victory for constitutional values: “The First Amendment does not belong to the comfortable.”

This is at least the third time in recent years that California Democrats have fought to kill a bill that would have harmed the interests of adults who sexually assault minors. Here’s a headline from 2025 about another bill written by a Democrat:

Democrats were eventually shamed into passing that bill, abandoning their effort to kill it.

A similar story played out two years before that:

It’s becoming a seasonal event in the California legislature, as bills to harm pedophiles appear and Democrats rush to smother them. At least they’re not afraid to show what they value.

Chris Bray is a senior correspondent at The Federalist and a former infantry sergeant in the U.S. Army. He has a history PhD from the University of California Los Angeles, not that it did him any good. He also posts on Substack, at "Tell Me How This Ends," here.