While Iowa Rep. Steve King is garnering headlines for his call to oust U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, his statement that the federal Hate Crimes Prevention Act would create “special protection for pedophiles” is getting another type of attention.

Politifact, a Pulitzer-prize winning project by the staff of the St. Petersburg Times, has investigated King’s claim and discovered it’s not only a lie, but what they clasify as a “pants on fire” lie.

So we’ve found nothing to support the opponents’ claims that pedophiles would be protected by the hate crimes bill. The experience of 31 states that have similar laws, the FBI’s definition of sexual orientation and the opinions of legal experts have persuaded us not only that the opponents are wrong, but that their arguments are preposterous.

The Hate Crimes Prevention Act has drawn fire from some conservatives due to one section of the bill that would add “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” to the list of hate crime categories.

King told Fox News on May 6 that adding sexual orientation to the bill would provide “special protection to pedophiles.”

Well, so within that definition, though, of sexual orientation by the American Psychological Association you’ve got a whole list of proclivities — they call them paraphilias — and in that list, among them are pedophiles.

However the FBI’s Hate Crime Data Collection Guidelines, prepared in response to the 1990 Hate Crime Statistics Act, defines “sexual orientation bias” as “a preformed negative opinion or attitude toward a group of persons based on their sexual attraction toward, and responsiveness to, members of their own sex or members of the opposite sex, e.g., gays, lesbians, heterosexuals.”

Politifact also found that there are currently 31 states with hate crime laws that include sexual orientation, and there are no cases at either the federal, state or local level that even come close to what King describes.

(h/t to the Sioux City Journal’s Bret Hayworth)