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Sounds reasonable to me.
What a joke it was that they were ever disallowed the right to peacefully protest the mass destruction of the unborn via abortion. They complain about the voilence outside of the clinic which was almost non-existent while violence abounded inside the clinics to the tune of 53,000,000 babies lives terminated worldwide each year!
High court rules in favor of abortion protesters
3:15 p.m. February 28, 2006
WASHINGTON – A 20-year-old legal fight over protests outside abortion clinics ended Tuesday with the Supreme Court ruling that federal extortion and racketeering laws cannot be used against demonstrators.
The 8-0 decision was a setback for abortion clinics that were buoyed when the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals kept their case alive two years ago despite the high court's 2003 ruling that had cleared the way for lifting a nationwide injunction on anti-abortion leader Joseph Scheidler and others.
Anti-abortion groups appealed to the justices after the lower court sought to determine whether the injunction could be supported by findings that protesters had made threats of violence.
In Tuesday's ruling, Justice Stephen Breyer said Congress did not create “a freestanding physical violence offense” in the federal extortion law known as the Hobbs Act.
Instead, Breyer wrote, Congress addressed violence outside abortion clinics in 1994 by passing the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, which allows for court injunctions to set limits for such protests.
“It's a great day for pro-lifers,” said Troy Newman, president of Operation Rescue.
Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women, said the decision was disappointing because the injunction had decreased violence outside clinics nationally.
She said the clinic access act is problematic because it requires abortion providers to seek injunctions “city by city” and turns back the clock to the late 1980s when NOW played cat and mouse with Operation Rescue in trying to anticipate the cities and clinics that abortion protesters planned to target next.
Newman said his group and others have set their sights on the clinic access law, filing legal challenges they hope will lead courts – possibly even the Supreme Court– to overturn it.
Abortion opponents hope momentum is shifting in their favor: Last week, the high court decided to consider reinstating a federal ban on what opponents call partial-birth abortion, and the South Dakota legislature's passed a bill that would make it a crime for doctors to perform an abortion unless it was necessary to save the woman's life.
President Bush, asked about the South Dakota measure in an interview with ABC News' Elizabeth Vargas, said Tuesday he hadn't “paid attention to that, to this particular issue you're talking about” but “I am not going to prejudge how the Supreme Court is going to judge a particular issue.”
However, he said, “My position has always been three exceptions: rape, incests and the life of the mother.” Asked if he would include the broader category of health of the mother, Bush said: “No. I said life of the mother, and health is a very vague term, but my position has been clear on that ever since I started running for office.”
In the abortion protest case, social activists and the AFL-CIO had sided with the demonstrators out of concern that the federal extortion law could be used to thwart their efforts to change public policy or agitate for better wages and working conditions.
The legal battle began in 1986, when NOW filed a class-action suit challenging tactics used by the Pro-Life Action Network to block women from entering abortion clinics.
NOW's legal strategy was novel at the time, relying on civil provisions of the 1970 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, which was used predominantly in criminal cases against organized crime. The lawsuit also relied on the Hobbs Act, a 55-year-old law banning extortion.
A federal judge issued a nationwide injunction against the anti-abortion protesters after a Chicago jury found in 1998 that demonstrators had engaged in a pattern of racketeering by interfering with clinic operations, menacing doctors, assaulting patients and damaging clinic property.
But the Supreme Court ruled in 2003 that the extortion law could not be used against the protesters because they had not illegally “obtained property” from women seeking to enter clinics to receive abortions.
Justice Samuel Alito did not participate in the decision because he was not a member of the court when the case was argued.
The cases are Scheidler v. NOW, 04-1244, and Operation Rescue v. NOW, 04-1352.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/n...nprotests.html
Sounds reasonable to me.
All I have to say is, my cousin had to get an abortion, and she went through a lot of emotional because of it. If ANYBODY! and I mean ANYBODY would have said ANYTHING insulting to her while she was entering the clinic I would have brought a bat to their heads, I don't ing care what you believe in! People who do that deserve to get beaten, that's my opinion!
If you want to protest abortion, find some other ing way!
There's no guarantee of freedom from speech in the US.
that's true... but let me tell you something, in that cir stance, and with cousin involved, there is no guarantee of freedom from bat either!
These protestors are so violent and are literally doing everything they can to stop women from being able to get to the doors of an abortion clinic. I think this kind of thing is disgusting.
There are laws to stop them from physically abusing or harassing people.
But that wasn't what the injunction was about. It was stopping anyone
from protesting outside an abortion clinic or at least stopping some groups
from protesting outside abortion clinics. Breaking the law is still breaking
the law. Even for those with baseball bats.
Funny how your eyes are wide open when pro lifers protest abortions but when pro gay rights people or NOW or some other left-wing organization protests (and they do it violently too) your eyes are shut.
Double standard anybody?
yes, I'm aware I would probably go to jail fro cracking someone's head with a bat xray, but in that situation I really don't know if I could stop myself. I think those who insult women when they are vulnerable like that are the s of the earth.
I just hope you can actually swing a bat.
Are the protests violent, though?
Screaming your heads off, waving placards, and standing so close to the walkways and entrance and the clinic visitors, even if not actually striking clinic visitors and staff, is violent behavior, very aggressive, and intimidating.
When war, etc dissenters wanted to protest in similar fashion at dubya/ head speeches and inaugurations, they have been suppressed by the police and forced to locate exclusivley on a small plot at a large distance from the event.
Remember how NYC police suppressed dissenters at the Repug nominating convention in 2003, even so far as to plant plain-clothes police among the dissenters in order to foment violence by the dissenters and counter-violence by the police?
if a guy ever said that to me, I'd be confused as well.
I was reading about an incident in the early nineties where women protestors stormed St. Patrik's Cathedral in Manhattan while mass was going on, yelling pro life chants and throwing used tampons on the floor. They even desecrated the tabernacle.
Yes, protest on the left and the right can get violent.
an incident? I see.
Incident, protest, whatever you want to call it. I guess that it's because its women protesting in favor of abortion and the targets of their protests is the Catholic Church, then its OK.
you mean yelling PRO-CHOICE chants, right? Remember, pro-life means against abortion, pro-choice is pro-abortion
If those women were protesting in favor of abortion and yelling pro-life chants, it must have been a confusing situation.
no, but you're using one incident from the 90s to back-up your claim that gay pride and NOW rallies are violent. The incident you cited was violent, but I still don't believe that your average gay pride or NOW rally is nearly as violent or threatening as your average abortion clinic protest
maybe they were Baptists
they aren't
If a gay person needs an abortion, they are doing something wrong.
tell that to Arnold in "Junior"!
Southern Baptists?
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