A historical look at how anarchists in the 1990s mobilized against attacks on reproductive freedom and autonomy by taking direct action and building autonomous infrastructure.
By Spencer Beswick
As the Supreme Court prepares to reverse Roe v. Wade under a Democratic president, house, and senate, it is clear that action at the ballot box is insufficient to protect abortion. Reproductive rights were not won by electoral means, and that is not how we will defend them.
Anarcha-feminist traditions of grassroots struggle and autonomous abortion infrastructure offer alternative strategies. As the anarcha-feminist Liz Highleyman put it in 1992, “the day when abortion is again made illegal may come sooner than we like to think. We must be ready to take our bodies and our lives into our own hands.”
Anarcha-feminists were on the front lines of the struggle for abortion throughout the 1980s and ‘90s. They were convinced that Roe v. Wade would not last forever and that they could not depend on the state and the legal system to protect reproductive freedom. Anarcha-feminists took a three-pronged approach to abortion struggle: defense of abortion clinics, construction of grassroots reproductive health infrastructure, and an anti-state approach to building feminist dual power.
Defense of Abortion Clinics
Anarcha-feminists physically protected abortion clinics from the likes of Operation Rescue, which was formed in 1986 to act as anti-abortion shock troops. They assaulted abortion clinics and supported bombings and assassinations of abortion providers using the slogan “if you believe abortion is murder, act like it’s murder.”
Broad feminist and queer coalitions mobilized against Operation Rescue. Anarcha-feminists introduced black bloc tactics and a willingness to engage in physical confrontation. They used these confrontational tactics to successfully protect clinics in NYC, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and across the country.
When Operation Rescue attempted to host a summer training camp in Minneapolis in 1993, anarchists physically confronted them, blocked them in their church, disrupted their meetings, vandalized their materials, protected clinics from their attacks, and generally made them unwelcome. Although some liberals opposed these tactics, anarchists and other militants handed Operation Rescue a major defeat and ran them out of town.
Reflecting on the experience, a local anarchist named Liza wrote that “it seems like no matter how hard activists fight, we rarely win. Except this time we were victorious. We fought against these fascists … We saw the demise of Operation Rescue in the Twin Cities, partly due to our unprecedented aggressiveness and opposition, and partly because their movement is losing, big time.”
Poster distributed by anarchists in Minneapolis (Profane Existence 1993)
Construction of Grassroots Reproductive Health Infrastructure
Anarcha-feminists established autonomous infrastructure and self-help groups in which people learned to take care of their own bodies and induce abortions on their own terms. As one anarchist put it in a 1991 article, “medicine is something we must take into our own hands. Because how can you smash the state if you’re still walking funny from a visit to the gynecologist’s?”
Threats to legal abortion produced an urgent need, as Highleyman wrote in 1992, to “rebuild the network of feminist women’s health and reproductive resources that existed in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.” Anarchists called for the revival of groups like the Chicago Jane Collective that provided over ten thousand underground abortions before they were legalized. While anarcha-feminists supported abortions provided by accredited doctors, their focus on women’s autonomy led them to draw on alternative traditions of women-controlled health practices. This includes herbal and holistic methods which women have used “throughout the ages … to control their fertility and reproduction.”
Anarchists advocated expanding grassroots infrastructure and self-organization to gain the knowledge and skills necessary to perform their own reproductive care. They argued that this would produce true reproductive freedom and autonomy that was independent of the state and its laws.
Anti-State Approach to Building Feminist Dual Power
Anarcha-feminists did not appeal to the state to maintain abortion rights. They believed that the state was inherently patriarchal and was ultimately the enemy of reproductive justice. Thus, the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation (1989-98) argued in its draft political statement that “our freedom will not come through the passage of yet more laws but through the building of communities strong enough to defend themselves against anti-choice and anti-queer terror, rape, battery, child abuse and police harassment.”
Anarchists spread this analysis in the feminist movement, including by marching in blocs at reproductive justice demonstrations. In place of the slogan “we’re pro-choice and we vote,” anarcha-feminists often marched behind a banner reading “we’re pro-choice and we riot!”
Anarchists supported struggles to maintain legal abortion but argued that we must be ready to act on our own terms in the fight for bodily autonomy and self-determination. Establishing reproductive healthcare infrastructure is a key component of feminist dual power that challenges the hegemony of the state and capitalism. This kind of infrastructure prefigures—and concretely establishes—a world defined by mutual aid, solidarity, and autonomy.
As Sunshine Smith remarked in 1990, forming self-help medical groups and abortion infrastructure in the Bay Area “has, in very concrete ways, made our struggle against the anti-abortion group Operation ‘Rescue’ and the ‘Supreme’ Court stronger and more effective. We have learned that if the time comes, we can and will do home abortions. We are becoming physically aware of the invasion the government is conducting into our bodies. We are now able to repulse the state from our uteri because we are gaining the knowledge that enables us to control our own bodies.”
One speaker at the Ban Off Our Bodies rally in the nation’s capital said that Saturday was just “day one of a ‘Summer of Rage’ where we will be ungovernable. Ungovernable!”
“With the Supreme Court planning to overturn Roe v. Wade, we are at a tipping point in the fight to be able to make decisions about our own bodies, lives, and futures.”
The stakes are high. If Roe v. Wade is struck down, a Michigan law from 1931 will immediately make it a felony to perform or receive an abortion, even in the case of rape or incest. As activists fighting this terrible outcome, we think it is crucial for the movement to discuss what political perspectives and strategies are needed to defend abortion rights.
Fighting for Roe and Beyond
The current challenge to Roe v. Wade brought by the Far Right has escalated the need to not only defend abortion but also to expand access to it under a federal law that guarantees free, safe abortion on demand, and without apology. Even Bernie Sanders said that Congress needed to pass legislation to codify abortion. This was one of the demands of the movement in Argentina that recently won their struggle to legalize abortion. They fought for a federal law so that courts and individual municipalities could not take it away. Indeed, since Roe v. Wade was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973, there have been almost constant efforts to restrict and limit abortion rights on the basis that it is not a federally protected right established by Congress.
The Dead End of Relying on Democrats or an Electoral Strategy
As pointed out in a speech published by Left Voice given by a feminist activist in Detroit, the Democrats have squandered multiple opportunities to pass a federal law protecting abortion rights. She even quoted Obama’s 2007 speech in which he promised, “The first thing I’d do as president is sign the Freedom of Choice Act.” Two years after he gave that speech he said abortion wasn’t his highest legislative priority. So it should be clear to everyone that, contrary to what “shoot ’em in the leg” Joe Biden has said, electing more Democrats in the midterm elections will not guarantee abortion rights. In fact, Democratic Party leaders like Pelosi and Schumer are campaigning for Henry Cuellar, a Texas pro-life Democrat, instead of his pro-choice progressive opponent Jessica Cisneros.
The Democrats are a political party of capitalism, as Biden and Nancy Pelosi have both stated publicly. Thus, what the Democrats desire most is to stabilize the system. They don’t seriously fight for many of the issues they say they support because doing so would create an avenue for the working class and oppressed to fight for our demands. This is why our liberation can never be achieved through the Democratic Party.
The Need for Self-Organization and Committees of Action
To bring the full power of the movement to bear on this issue, we have to develop organizations that are democratically controlled by the movement’s rank and file. Such organizations, be they committees of action in schools, in workplaces, or coalitions like the Michigan Coalition for Reproductive Liberation (MCRL), have to be based on collective leadership that expresses the interests of the working class and oppressed — particularly women, trans folk, nonbinary, and other LGBTQ+ folks, and people of color — who are directly impacted by the threat of overturning Roe. That means the organizations have to be politically independent to ensure that the movement’s goals do not get subverted by the electoral aspirations or needs of politicians seeking election. These committees and coalitions must function on a democratic basis and create opportunities in which the movement as a whole can discuss, debate, and collectively decide which direction the movement is headed, what its demands are, and what strategies and tactics it will employ.
For a United Front to Defend Abortion Rights
The forces and state institutions that we are confronting are massive; therefore, we can win only through mass action. At the same time that we are creating grassroots organizations and committees of action, we need to mobilize mass organizations, like unions and larger social justice organizations like Planned Parenthood or National Organization for Women (NOW), that support abortion rights. In a time of increased labor struggles we need to make sure that these organizations that represent thousands, and in some cases, tens of thousands, of workers and oppressed people use their full force to fight for the lives of the people they represent, instead of allowing all their energy to be directed toward the Democratic Party, a party more invested in stabilizing capitalism than in fighting for justice or liberation.
Rights Are Won in the Streets
While Michigan attorney general Dana Nessel and seven county prosecutors throughout Michigan have signed a pledge to not enforce an abortion ban, this pledge will only be a symbolic gesture unless the movement fights to prevent the ban’s enforcement. This would include militantly defending abortion clinics that refuse to close.
Another issue is that many abortion providers, according to the Wall Street Journal, plan on shutting down if Roe is overturned. These providers and some physicians fear being arrested. While that concern is understandable, they should be more concerned about the social ramifications if they don’t courageously challenge a ban, a challenge that the movement in the streets is prepared to meet.
The movement has to urge these providers to stay open or convince the workers and physicians who make these clinics operate to keep them open alongside the movement if the clinic owners refuse to do so. Such a bold act would create an important opportunity to challenge the ban and forcefully demand the passage of state and federal law protecting the right to abortion.
In return, the movement would have to be prepared to employ multiple tactics to disrupt “business as usual” and counterpose the collective power of the working class and oppressed to the repressive actions of the state and the right wing, which is hell-bent on creating a dystopian future in which people with uteruses have no control over their bodies or their lives. We need to be organizing walkouts, work stoppages, and disruptive demonstrations to make the chant “No Justice, No Peace!” mean something.
The movement must rely on the collective power of the working class and not invest its limited energy or hopes in lawsuits — the courts have already shown why we can’t count on them — such as the one filed by Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Planned Parenthood, or in the effort to place abortion rights on the November 2022 Michigan ballot. It is actually an undemocratic practice to allow an electorate to decide which rights a marginalized group has. If that was our method during the civil rights movement, we would have never defeated Jim Crow in the South.
This Fight Is a National One
The impending overturning of Roe v. Wade, and decades of the erosion of abortion rights at the state level, shows clearly that Supreme Court decisions alone are insufficient for protecting the rights of the oppressed. Our fight must be a national one or else risk fracturing into state-level organizing that, at best, can be co-opted into electing politicians on unfulfilled promises of protecting abortion rights on the one hand, or directed toward organizing unsustainable and risky networks for underground abortions on the other. Worst of all, focusing only on local struggles leaves us isolated and disconnected from the rest of the movement, whose solidarity we will need, and to which we will have to show solidarity if we have any chance of defeating the right wing and other sectors of the state seeking to enforce the ban. The abortion rights movement nationally must be prepared to be mobile and to act boldly and unapologetically in defense of campaigns for abortion rights in states with the most oppressive anti abortion laws, like the Freedom Riders who traveled to the Jim Crow South to support struggles against segregation.
At the national level, we need to demand a federal law guaranteeing access to free, safe, legal abortions, and that demand can only be won by a movement that combines its forces from local struggles into a national one. Only a nationally coordinated, politically independent movement, like that modeled in Argentina, can challenge the co-optation of politicians who have campaigned for the past 50 years on justified fears of the right wing stripping our rights while failing to take any action to protect them.
Connecting the Abortion Rights Movement to Other Struggles of the Oppressed
Forms of politically independent organization at the national level will only become more important as the rights of other oppressed groups like trans youth, LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, and racial minorities continue to come under attack, and may be eroded in new ways opened by the precedent insinuated by the leaked Roe v. Wade decision. Language in the leaked Supreme Court decision questioning privacy rights opens a path for new legal means by which the right wing can enforce capitalist white heteropatriarchal hegemony. States like Texas, Arizona, Louisiana, and Alabama have already begun legislating attacks on trans healthcare and the decision may open a path for reinstituting sodomy laws and overturning the decision legalizing same-sex marriage. Access to birth control may also come under threat in some states. The decision may even have implications for government surveillance and data privacy.
The abortion rights movement must recognize that these struggles are interconnected, and it must prepare itself to take action alongside other oppressed people to engage in shared struggle and to increase our collective power.
Since the leaked document that surfaced last week of the Supreme Court Justice’s vote to strike down Roe v. Wade, many have rightfully declared that a ban on abortion will not stop people from having abortions. Indeed, history has shown that even under the most violent and oppressive conditions, before modern technology existed, women had knowledge of the reproductive body, of herbs, plants, and other methods to induce abortion and prevent pregnancy. Across cultures and communities, mainly women were the keepers of this knowledge, specialists in the field, whose gifts provided reproductive health services to women in their community. They were midwives, nurses and counselors.
Activist and Marxist scholar Silvia Federici is perhaps best known for the Wages for Housework campaign launched in the 1970s, which demanded payment for domestic labor in an attempt to make a critical intervention in the capitalist exploitation of women.1 Like most of her work, Patriarchy of the Wage emphasizes “reproductive labor,” labor that does not directly produce profit for the owning class, but instead reproduces and cares for the laborers whose work creates that profit.
In this book, Federici analyzes various forms of reproductive labor to generate new understandings of Marxist theory, and new possibilities for socialist organizers. Ultimately, Federici argues that understanding reproductive labor and its gendered nature is necessary for building a strong socialist movement, and an equitable world where everyone can thrive.
Chapters 1 and 2 constitute a defense of the Wages for Housework campaign against critique from other socialist activists. Federici argues that many leftists depict waged la- borers as the protagonists of socialist struggle while marginalizing unwaged laborers such as housewives, to the detriment of both women and the socialist movement. These leftists position domestic work as a natural act of love and care that would occur even without the organizing presence of capitalism in workers’ lives. Federici argues that this narrative serves the owning class by separating reproductive labor from waged labor, when in fact both are necessary for profit generation. The Wages for Housework campaign demands payment for the “real length of the workday,” which extends beyond the time spent directly laboring for a wage into the time spent caring for the bodies, minds, and children of workers (20). In these chapters, Federici connects the patriarchal positioning of women as natural domestic labor- ers who deserve no wage to low wages in feminized professions, arguing that once women become “used to working for nothing,” it is easy for employers to justify low wages in fields like librarianship, nursing, and teaching (15). The central argument here is that true working- class solidarity requires valuing all labor, including reproductive labor.
Federici moves from socialist practice into socialist theory in chapters 3 through 5, arguing that classical Marxism is incomplete without the feminist critique that unpaid reproductive labor is central to capitalist exploitation, and thus an important site of working class struggle. These chapters are very much part of a conversation between Federici and other Marxist theo- rists and may be of less interest to readers with little grounding in this discourse. However, library workers may find much of value in chapter 4, “Marx, Feminism, and the Construction of the Commons.” Federici argues that one of the flaws in Marx’s analysis was his belief that industrialization would build the conditions necessary for socialist revolution by increasing productivity and reducing scarcity. Federici incorporates the work of ecofeminists who argue that while industrial advancement may increase productivity, it also devastates the planet and creates new demands for reproductive labor required to sustain human life in increas- ingly damaged ecosystems. This chapter calls for a shift away from Marxist communism toward a politics of the commons, focused on building a society modeled on “spaces [such as community gardens] that are self-organized and both require and produce community” (67). While libraries are not named in this chapter (nor are they typically self-organized), I found myself thinking about how they serve as a commons, providing space and labor that supports a variety of productive and reproductive communal activities.
In the final two chapters, Federici discusses the history of two categories of feminized laborers: housewives and sex workers. The central argument of both of these chapters is that as capitalism shifted into heavy industry in the late nineteenth century, workers’ bodies required more care so they could handle the physical demands of the labor. Workers also needed to be replaced more often. This led to the development of the family wage and the housewife required to care for a male worker’s body, as well as to bear and care for children who would serve as future laborers. This duty to reproduce led many married women to resist sex and created the need for another kind of reproductive laborer: the sex worker, who could serve men’s need for sexual pleasure when their wives would not. These are interesting argu- ments, but I wish these chapters had been longer and contained more supporting evidence for Federici’s historical claims. The history of sex workers, the history of housewives, and the complex relationship between the two in the context of patriarchy and capitalism is simply too much to cover in two short chapters. These chapters would also have benefited from more analysis of race and how it intersects with dominant views of housewives and sex workers. Patriarchy of the Wage offers an important feminist intervention into socialist practice and theory, and I admire Federici’s commitment to addressing both at once. This book has much to offer for anyone interested in socialist praxis that accounts for reproductive labor and the environmental toll of capitalism. While some of its arguments are underdeveloped, it is particularly strong when laying out Federici’s politics of the commons, pulling in arguments from Marxist and feminist theory, and examples from feminists and socialists struggling in a variety of contexts. Library workers will value this book for contributions to theory about reproductive labor and feminized professions, and for the possibilities it offers in viewing li- braries as sites for building a politics of the commons.
Note 1. Federici frequently uses the word “women” to refer to cisgender women whose bodies are capable of producing children. I believe she does so because this artificial conflation of sex and gender is fundamental to the systems of oppression she is exposing in her work. Capitalism and patriarchy position “women” as a biological category destined to engage in reproductive labor because of the assumed reproductive capacities of our bodies. Federici’s arguments in this book would be stronger if she had engaged critically with this use ofthe word women and its power to reinscribe the gender binary and reinforce patriarchy.
Protesters are peacefully demonstrating outside the homes of Supreme Court justices who are about to overturn Roe v. Wade — and conservatives are demanding the government arrest them.
Abortion rights advocates stage a protest outside the home of US associate Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh on May 11, 2022 in Chevy Chase, Maryland. (Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images)
Even as the Democrats’ feeble legislative attempt to codify federal protections for abortion rights goes down in flames, many Washington elites are directing their attention and anger toward the same target: no, not right-wing judges reaching their ideological hands into millions of people’s bodies, but instead the protesters peacefully demonstrating outside the homes of Supreme Court justices who are about to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Prominent Republican lawmakers, conservative operatives, and Beltway pundits are demanding the government arrest demonstrators — and to do so, they are citing a McCarthy-era statute passed to stop people from protesting the prosecutions of alleged communists. Ignored in the discourse is a past ruling from the Supreme Court effectively blessing conservative protests at the homes of abortion clinic workers.
The largely manufactured outrage is the latest distraction designed to shift attention away from the issue at hand: the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority is about to deny basic reproductive rights to tens of millions of people in roughly half the country.
Conservative operatives want Washington reporters focused on inane questions like who leaked the court’s draft opinion, and they want journalists and Democrats to criticize protesters who are outraged by the court’s overriding lack of respect for people’s bodily autonomy. It is part of a larger right-wing movement in recent years to cancel, criminalize, and literally crush dissent throughout the country, even as the conservative political noise machine continues to blare Braveheart-esque screams of “freedom!” against so-called “cancel culture.”
Corporate news outlets are taking the bait, fretting about the leak and calling for arrests over peaceful demonstrations. Like usual, they are focused on narrow flash points of anger and upheaval that will likely prove temporary, rather than the far more sweeping and ominous impact of the court’s looming ruling to overturn the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and allow states to force people to carry their pregnancies to term.
Even as the nation is poised to enact an injustice of historic proportions, those in power and their chosen mouthpieces only appear to care about one thing: upholding the rights and privileges of the ruling class, and ensuring they remain safely ensconced in the Washington bubble.
To his credit, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer issued the most rational statement of all, saying, “My house — there’s protests three, four times a week outside my house. The American way to peacefully protest is OK.”
But he has been drowned out by the voices demanding a crackdown.
The hypocrisy is particularly powerful among liberals like Senate Democratic whip Dick Durbin of Illinois. He purports to support the pro-choice movement but he has spent his decades atop the Washington power structure failing to secure reproductive rights, and this week he has spent his time using his platform to deride the court protesters, calling them “reprehensible.” Durbin’s behavior — emblematic of so many liberals and media elites — evokes the warning of Dr Martin Luther King.
“I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate,” King wrote in 1963 amid the civil rights struggle of his era. “The white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action.’”
The Ghost of McCarthy
Justice Samuel Alito authored the draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that was leaked to Politicolast week. In the opinion, Alito writes the Roe decision “was egregiously wrong from the start” and finds that the Constitution “does not prohibit the citizens of each state from regulating or prohibiting abortion.”
The opinion adds that “we cannot allow our decisions to be affected by any extraneous influences such as concern about the public’s reaction to our work,” as if to hammer home the conservatives justices’ contempt for the people whose lives they are seeking to upend.
The Right’s weapon of choice is a law passed during the Red Scare hysteria of the 1950s.
Despite the court’s supposed lack of concern about what the public thinks, tall fences were quickly erected around the Supreme Court building. In recent days, protesters havegathered outside the homes of Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and Justice Alito to register their opposition.
There’s no evidence that the protests have been violent, and Congress is already fast-tracking legislation to allow the Supreme Court’s police force to provide security for justices’ families. Notably, the bipartisan bill includes no additional security protections for people who go to abortion facilities amid crediblethreats of violence.
But still, conservatives and elite pundits are calling for a major crackdown against dissent, pitting themselves against a First Amendment that explicitly states the government may not pass any law “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
The Right’s weapon of choice is a law passed during the Red Scare hysteria of the 1950s.
Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) wrote a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland on Tuesday demanding the Justice Department “vigorously investigate and prosecute” those protesting at Supreme Court justices’ homes.
“Federal law makes it a crime for a person, ‘with the intent of influencing any judge, juror, witness, or court officer, in the discharge of his duty,’ to ‘picket[] or parade[] . . . in or near a building or residence occupied or used by such judge,’” Hawley wrote, adding: “The First Amendment is no shield to this illegal conduct.”
The Washington Post editorial board agreed with this premise, writing a column on Monday arguing that it is crucial to “protect robust demonstrations of political dissent while preventing them from turning into harassment or intimidation.”
To do so, argued the Post, the nation should look to an old law. “A federal law — 18 U.S.C. Section 1507 — prohibits ‘pickets or parades’ at any judge’s residence, ‘with the intent of influencing’ a jurist ‘in the discharge of his duty,” noted the editorial. “These are limited and justifiable restraints on where and how people exercise the right to assembly. Citizens should voluntarily abide by them, in letter and spirit. If not, the relevant governments should take appropriate action.”
On Tuesday, Post columnist Marc Thiessen, who worked as the chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush at the time that Roberts and Alito were confirmed to the court, amplified this argument, writing an opinion piece calling on the Biden administration to “enforce federal law barring harassment of the justices and their families in their homes.”
The supposedly “limited and justifiable” anti-picketing statute being cited by all these people — 18 U.S.C. § 1507 — was enacted as part of the Internal Security Act of 1950, a law requiring communist organizations to register with the government. This particular statute was specifically written to respond to reports of protests outside federal courts during US prosecutions of alleged communist party leaders.
One of the statute’s proponents, segregationist Senator Allen Ellender (D-LA), explained at the time: “The practice of picketing courts is of recent origin, and apparently has been employed almost solely in connection with proceedings involving alleged Communist Party members and sympathizers. . . . If we are to keep our national judiciary on the high plane it has enjoyed since the founding of this country, we must restrain these disgraceful practices, adopted by persons and groups who would undermine our country by first undermining our judiciary.”
The Supreme Court has subsequently struck down portions of the broader Internal Security Act. Furthermore, in 1983, the court limited the government’s prohibition on protests outside the Supreme Court, finding that the First Amendment protects picketing on sidewalks surrounding the court.
While the Post’s Aaron Blake wrote a story Wednesday headlined, “Yes, experts say protests at SCOTUS justices’ homes appear to be illegal,” one of conservatives’ go-to constitutional law scholars has said that relying on the Internal Security Act statute to quash protests could have troubling Constitutional implications.
George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, who has criticized the protests at justices’ houses, wrote a column in the Hill on Tuesday arguing that using the anti-picketing statute “to arrest protesters would be a serious blow to free speech and would be difficult to defend in the courts.”
He similarly told the Wall Street Journal: “As a free speech advocate, I would be very concerned about the use of that statute. I think that what these protesters are doing is reprehensible. I think it’s equally reprehensible for President [Joe] Biden not to denounce this. But when we start to charge protesters with crimes because they’re appearing at the homes of figures, including Supreme Court justices, you really do raise some first amendment concerns.”
Turley added, “I do think that if you brought a prosecution, it would raise some serious constitutional questions. And I would not bet on that being upheld on appeal.”
Selective Outrage
Beyond the troubling historical legacy of the statute they are referencing, there is another problem with conservatives calling for the detention of these protesters: they only seem to worry about such demonstrations when they’re being done by the Left.
Hawley, for example, didn’t call for anyone to “vigorously investigate and prosecute” the insurrectionists who violently stormed the US Capitol last year. In fact, he cheered on those protesters shortly before the insurrection and since then, his campaign has been selling merchandise sporting pictures of him raising a fist to those insurrectionists.
Similarly, while the Post’s editorial board noted that it is important to prevent political dissent “from turning into harassment or intimidation,” the antiabortion movement has been known to picket the homes of people who work at abortion clinics — and worse. Violence against abortion clinics has been on the rise, and clinics around the country are worried that attacks will spike after the Supreme Court issues its abortion decision.
The Supreme Court has in the past approved efforts by protesters to picket private residences — specifically in a case involving protests by the antiabortion movement outside the homes of abortion clinic workers.
What’s more, the Supreme Court has in the past approved efforts by protesters to picket private residences — and specifically did so in a case involving protests by the antiabortion movement outside the homes of abortion clinic workers.
In 1994, the Supreme Court found that a Florida court’s content-neutral injunction creating a three-hundred-foot protest-free buffer zone around the residences of abortion clinic workers’ homes was unconstitutional and overbroad. The court found “a limitation on the time, duration of picketing, and number of pickets outside a smaller zone could have accomplished the desired result.”
Finally, by selectively boosting outrage over public protests, corporate media is only making matters worse. After the George Floyd protests in 2020, major outlets appeared far more concerned about the specter of looters and rioters than they were about the actual grave injustice of a police officer murdering an unarmed black man for allegedly using a counterfeit $20 bill.
News outlets have also been deeply perturbed by activists’ calls to “defund” the police in the wake of Floyd’s murder. While no cities have actually slashed police budgets, it’s become incredibly common for pundits and conservative Democrats to say that the “defund” movement is weighing down the party.
Thanks to such selective hullabaloo, new legislative attempts to curtail public protests will likely be forthcoming — and unlike Democratic lawmakers’ doomed attempt to protect abortion rights on Wednesday, these efforts could be successful.
On Monday, the US Senate unanimously passed a measure offered by Senators John Cornyn (R-TX) and Chris Coons (D-DE) to extend Supreme Court Police protection to justices’ families.
A previous version of the legislation offered by Cornyn would have allowed the Supreme Court Police to arrest anyone who “knowingly and willfully obstructs, resists, or interferes with a member of the Supreme Court Police” busy protecting justices or their families. Coons noted in a press release, “Sections from an earlier draft of this bill were removed prior to introduction, citing free speech concerns.”
You can subscribe to David Sirota’s investigative journalism project, the Lever, here.
For Johnson and Peters, their vision of a Roe-free America entails executions of abortions providers and possibly civil war.
Johnson said that while many states will immediately move to outlaw abortion if the court strikes down Roe, that means little “if there’s no criminal penalty behind procuring an abortion.” Harsh penalties must be enacted, Johnson suggested. “If it’s murder, then it needs to be treated like murder.”
“That’s right,” Peters agreed. “We need a governor with the balls to stand up and say that: ‘I will bulldoze every single Planned Parenthood facility in my state. I will bulldoze any facility that facilitates this murder of unborn babies, preborn, real living people. I will make it a criminal offense to fund anybody that does this, and if you’re found out funding murder or carrying out murder, you will be executed. Period.’ That’s what needs to happen.”
“If we truly believe that abortion is murder, then we need to start acting like it,” Johnson responded.
“Abortion is murder, and those who carry it out should be executed,” Peters declared. “This is the most powerful prayer in recent history answered by God for the entire world to watch and witness and see his greatness, his glory, his power. This is a time that we all need to unite. We’re at war. This is a war.”
“Absolutely,” Johnson replied. “We went to war over slavery, right? Why? Because there was a group of people who were seen and treated as subhuman. And right now, in our country, there is a group of people who are seen and treated as subhuman. We are, in our society, at war, but maybe it means more than that. And maybe it should. If there was ever a time, if there was ever an issue for us to actually go to war over—when this becomes illegal, and if these clinics try to remain open and kill these babies, then maybe direct action needs to take place. If there was ever an issue for us to stand up and say, ‘This is something that we are willing to physically fight for,’ this is it!”
