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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.
Spurwing Plover says
How many of those Pro-Abortionists sent money to Greenpeace to Save the Polar Bears and donate or join PETA to oppose the so called Animal Abuse
Mo de Profit says
Two Tier Kier is doing the same here in the UK.
Two Tier justice is perfect Marxism.
Algorithmic Analyst says
Young Democrat females are fanatical about the abortion issue.
Allan Goldstein says
If leftist whores wish to abort their issue, is that a BAD thing?
I personally wouldn’t even be averse to tying their tubes. ~
rj says
What exactly do you mean by your comment?
Allan Goldstein says
I mean that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
( the horse apple doesn’t fall far from the horse’s ass )
Cat says
It’s knee jerk Amygdala activation slogan shouting as there are no back alley coat hanger abortions anymore .
They scream because they are triggered to by some outdated idea. They hug themselves with joy at eliminating a pregnancy (admittedly a relief in some situations). .But a normal person would feel an abortion is sad, and not feel proud and triumphant. They would at least have mixed emotions. But they are no longer normal. They’ve been turned into killers.
Alix Brit says
Don’t forget the “Shout your Abortion” t-shirts. Absolutely shameless. Most of the women I know who were forced to have abortions were either ambivalent or sad. And the married couples I know who aborted ended up getting divorced. Nobody wins. The chemical abortions at least in my opinion, sound particularly frightening as a woman goes through this – intense bleeding, cramping, etc. – by herself and may be too ashamed to get help is she is in extreme pain. Yet Merrick Garland, Kamala Harris and devout Catholic Joe Biden think this is a OK.
Alix Brit says
Yet nobody wants to have sex with them – they are that repulsive!
John XY says
So the weaponization of “justice” that began under Obama continues. Any law that is not impartially enforced is no law. The courts have already warned the “Justice” Department of that. The FBI needs to be abolished.
Without some improvement we will need to abolish the DOJ as well. Let the states enforce the law.
CTripps says
The DOJ needs to be aborted.
Rob A says
Alas. If only those pro-abortionists had the courage of their convictions they would self terminate. But they’re all cowards and lack the courage to self terminate. If the believe so strongly in abortion then why haven’t they murdered their own children? That is if they have any which I seriously doubt.
Abortion is part of the globalist agenda to reduce the world’s population to somewhere around 500 million people. The world is full of shallow empty headed fools who are easily convinced by charismatic megalomaniacs that mass murder and genocide is a good and necessary thing if the subject is framed the right way.
Stephen Triesch says
Pro-abortion zealots like Mizer are guilty of what I call “birth privilege.” Mizer – and not someone else – was once one of those dispensable two-inch fetuses that abortion zealots treat as if they were cancerous tumors. Having themselves been afforded live birth, they nonetheless see no difficulty in denying that same privilege to countless others. This is arrogance and privilege at its worst.