By Dave Andrusko
As the last post of the week, I saved a very important op-ed written for Newsweek by Ryan Bangert of the Alliance Defending Freedom. You can read “The Justice Department’s Pro-Abortion Bias Threatens Civil Liberties” in its entirety here so I will just highlight just two of the important points he makes.
First, although obvious, it can’t be stated often enough: “The modern pro-abortion Left in the United States, on the other hand, has become increasingly extreme, adopting views that reflect the shocking, infanticidal abortion policies of North Korea and China, which permit abortion up to the moment of live birth.” In a word, Democrats have gone bonkers.
Second, and this is the crux of Bangert’s argument,
That extremism now prevails not only within the halls of radical pro-abortion organizations, but within the corridors of federal power. And it is progressively threatening the civil liberties of pro-life Americans.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the lopsided and deeply troubling way in which the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has chosen to enforce the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act.
That law makes it a crime to injure, intimidate, or obstruct any person from seeking or providing “reproductive services.”
This may seem impossible to believe but, alas, it’s true:
Since the 2022 leak of the U.S. Supreme Court‘s draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, there have been at least 87 attacks on pregnancy resource centers and 157 attacks on Catholic churches. Yet in 2022, the DOJ brought 26 charges under the FACE Act—all against pro-life individuals, for allegedly interfering with access to abortion.
Much of the rest of the op-ed is documenting the complete politicization of the Department of Justice under Attorney General Merrick Garland. You could see that coming by his reaction to Dobbs, which overturned Roe v. Wade. He issued a statement, according to Bangert,
proclaiming that the “Justice Department strongly disagrees with the Court’s decision,” and vowing to work “tirelessly to protect and advance” abortion by enforcing the FACE Act. Weeks later, on July 12, 2022, the department formed a “Reproductive Rights Task Force” headed by Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta, who characterized Dobbs as a “devastating blow to reproductive freedom.”
And the rest is history. He concludes
The discriminatory application of the FACE Act by the Department of Justice post-Dobbs, coupled with the department leadership’s own extreme ideological commitment to abortion, suggests that politically imposed silence, not even-handed law enforcement, is the department’s goal when it comes to the pro-life community. And here, as in all cases where law enforcement is compromised by an extreme political agenda, the ultimate victim is freedom.