By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog
In May, Paulette Harlow, a 75-year-old grandmother, was sentenced to
two years in prison for a civil disobedience protest at a D.C. abortion
clinic.
In September, Amber Smith-Stewart was sentenced to 30
days in prison for pro-abortion attacks on a pregnancy center. She and
her two co-defendants had been tied to attacks on three pregnancy
centers in Florida during which threatening messages such as “If
abortions aren’t safe than niether are you” and “YOUR TIME IS UP!!” had
been scrawled on them that were linked to the wave of nationwide attacks
by the pro-abortion Jane’s Revenge terror group.
Harlow was
sentenced for what the Biden-Harris Department of Justice described as
“a conspiracy that created a blockade” of the abortion clinic doors.
Generally this is known as civil disobedience, but
the FACE Act turned abortion clinics
into ‘first amendment free zones’ where people can spend years in
prison for doing the same things other protesters get away with.
However
the FACE Act equally applies to the pregnancy centers attacked by
Jane’s Revenge in the aftermath of the Supreme Court striking down Roe
v. Wade as unconstitutional.
Despite the FBI’s nationwide armed
raids on the homes of pro-life protesters, there have been virtually no
arrests in the dozens of attacks on pregnancy centers by pro-abortion
activists.
The arrests of Smith-Stewart and her three
co-defendants were the sole exception and ended in sentences of a month
in prison for the two women, and a year in prison for Caleb Freestone:
the male defendant. That’s in sharp contrast to the years in prison
typically dispensed to Harlow and the average pro-life protester
prosecuted under the FACE Act. Lauren Handy, one of the female
protesters at the D.C. abortion clinic, was sentenced to nearly 5 years
in prison.
While the Department of Justice aggressively employs
the Freedom of Access or FACE Act against pro-life protesters, it
selectively fails to enforce it against pro-abortion activists. And on
the rare occasion when it does, the two-tier political system of
enforcement quickly kicks in.
Rather than respecting the Supreme
Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization which
ended the fictitious legal claim of a constitutional abortion right,
Attorney General Merrick Garland and top Biden-Harris DOJ officials
responded by announcing the creation of the Reproductive Rights Task
Force. Rather than enforcing the FACE Act without any political
considerations, the task force was specifically geared to empower
abortion.
“Dobbs dealt a devastating blow to reproductive
freedom,” Acting Associate Attorney General Benjamin C. Mizer, who
established the RRTF task force, argued. “We established the
Reproductive Rights Task Force to bring a whole-of-department approach
to protecting access to reproductive health care following Dobbs.”
The
explicit linkage of the Dobbs decision to the task force was an
admission that the DOJ’s mission was to specifically protect abortion
and not anything else in violation of the FACE Act.
In a summer
press release, RRTF bragged that “since January 2021, the Department has
brought 25 cases involving a total of 57 defendants accused of criminal
FACE Act-related violations.” During this same period there were over
20
attacks on pregnancy centers.
These attacks ranged from firebombings to death threats to vandalism.
They included attacks on churches which are also illegal under the FACE
Act and liable to federal prosecution.
Despite that, the FBI did not
make a single arrest until
it was faced with congressional hearings by the new GOP majority. It
did however have the time and resources to send two dozen armed agents
to arrest a pro-life protester accused in a shoving incident at an
abortion clinic.
FBI Director Wray
testified that
“probably in the neighborhood of 70% of our abortion-related violence
cases or threats cases are cases of violence or threats against…
pro-life organizations. And we’re going after that through our joint
terrorism task forces, through our criminal authorities, FACE Act and
things like that.”
And yet out of 57 defendants only 4 were
pro-abortion while 53 were pro-life which means that while 70% of cases
involve attacks on pro-life groups but 92% of defendants are pro-life.
Only
7% of the DOJ’s FACE Act defendants are related to 70% of the cases
while 92% are related to 30% of the cases. This is a completely illegal
bias displayed in hard numbers.
It gets even worse because while
the average pro-life defendant received a multi-year prison sentence,
all the pro-abortion defendants got far lighter sentences.
After
the sentencing of Lauren Handy to nearly 5 years in prison for civil
disobedience, an FBI official falsely claimed that “the FBI and our
judicial system will not tolerate the obstruction of civil rights.” In
fact the FBI is dedicated to the violation of civil rights with a
two-tier system.
After two years and at least twenty incidents of
pro-abortion violence by a national network, the FBI and the Department
of Justice did virtually nothing to arrest and indict the majority of
the perpetrators. And while bias can be hard to prove, press releases by
the DOJ task force and statements by top DOJ officials make it clear
that its mission is pro-abortion, not pro-justice.
The language
of DOJ officials including Attorney General Merrick Garland and
Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta shows that rather than enforcing
the FACE Act as it’s written, they have invented a new pro-abortion
FACE Act and are enforcing that instead.
Garland and Gupta have
defined the mission of the task force as protecting “reproductive
freedom”, but the FACE Act protects “freedom of access” to clinics,
whether pro-abortion or pro-life as well as to churches and synagogues.
Replacing freedom of access with reproductive freedom has allowed the
DOJ to enforce a law that they invented rather than one that exists.
The
DOJ task force’s mission is not to enforce the FACE Act but to protect
abortion. By turning over FACE Act enforcement to a pro-abortion task
force, the Biden-Harris administration and its DOJ ensured the civil
rights violations proceeding from systemically unequal enforcement.
What
is at stake in the civil rights abuses of the Biden-Harris
administration and the Department of Justice goes beyond personal
opinions on abortion. A politicized justice system is the first and
foremost threat to civil rights. The politically selective
interpretation of laws leads to a two-tier justice system in which the
political agendas of those in power become the only law.
The FACE
Act was already inherently unconstitutional because the intent behind
it was to criminalize protests by one particular political movement
against another. While civil disobedience is illegal and may deserve
some punishment, a system under which members of one political movement
engaging in civil disobedience receive 5 years in prison while members
of another usually get an easily dismissed misdemeanor is traditional
form of political repression and not any fundamentally different than
the legal systems of Russia, China or Cuba.
The only thing that
kept the FACE Act from being the modern equivalent of WWI’s Sedition Act
and other legislation that liberals used to abhor before they gained
power and embraced their use was that the bias was in the agenda behind
it rather than in the text. The DOJ’s selective enforcement of the FACE
Act however has made it a full blown unconstitutional abomination.
The
DOJ and the FBI had the opportunity after the Dobbs decision and the
attacks by Jane’s Revenge to show that they could be trusted to fairly
enforce the law despite their personal politics and the only thing that
they demonstrated was that their politics are the law.
And if you
doubt that, ask the pro-life activists being sentenced to years in
prison or, better yet, ask the pro-abortion activists getting off with a
slap on the wrist. You’ll only have to wait 30 days.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.