AMAC Exclusive – By Aaron Flanigan
The deep-rooted corruption of the Biden administration has already reached new and frightening lows this year when the Department of Justice shockingly convicted six pro-life activists—who now face up to 11 years in prison and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines—for doing nothing more than peacefully singing hymns and praying in the hallway outside a Nashville abortion clinic.
The Biden administration’s record of anti-Christian persecution has garnered increasing attention from Republican leaders, and the conviction of the Nashville activists reveals the chilling extent to which the left is willing to weaponize the law to silence, intimidate, and ultimately imprison Christians, pro-life Americans, and other citizens who oppose the Democrat Party’s extreme views on social and cultural issues.
At the end of January, Chester Gallagher, Paul Vaughn, Heather Idoni, Calvin Zastrow, Coleman Boyd, and Dennis Green were found guilty of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act and of “conspiracy against rights,” both of which are felony charges. The Biden DOJ accused the activists of “force and physical obstruction to injure, intimidate and interfere with employees of the clinic and a patient who was seeking reproductive health services.”
But since-released video footage of the protest, which occurred in March 2021, tells a vastly different story. Rather than seeking to “injure” or “intimidate” expectant mothers, the activists were simply sitting in the abortion clinic hallway singing Christian songs without any discernible intention of threatening or causing harm to any women.
As many conservative analysts and legal scholars have argued, an honest reading of the FACE Act would preclude such severe prosecution of the Nashville protestors. As a recent Washington Examiner editorial notes, the FACE Act “prohibits intimidation and the use of force that is used to interfere with access to abortion clinics.” It does not, however “prohibit nonintrusive protest or supersede activists’ free speech rights.”
As such, the editorial continues, it is difficult to reach any conclusion other than that the Biden DOJ was eager to target pro-life American in violation of their First Amendment rights.
The Biden administration has notably pursued no comparable charges against the individuals responsible for vandalizing pro-life pregnancy centers and churches in the wake of the 2022 Dobbs decision. While the FACE Act is supposed to protect abortion clinics and pro-life clinics equally, in practice it has only been used to against pro-lifers.
The conviction of the Nashville protesters is not the only instance of Biden’s abuse of the FACE Act. In the fall of 2022, the FBI sent a team of armed agents to raid the home of Mark Houck, a Catholic pro-life activist and father of seven. Houck was arrested and charged with violating the FACE Act stemming from an incident outside an abortion center.
As video evidence showed, Houck was praying the rosary outside a clinic with his son when a pro-abortion activist approached and verbally harassed them. Houck described how the abortion activist hurled expletive-laced insults at his son, which prompted Houck to shove him to the ground.
For this act, Houck faced 11 years in prison and a $350,000 fine—a sentence slammed by conservatives and religious freedom advocates as further evidence of the Biden administration’s targeting of Christians.
“The Biden administration has filed two brazenly defective and discriminatory charges against Mark Houck under the FACE Act,” said Mark Breen, a lawyer from the conservative Thomas More Society. “This case is being brought solely to intimidate people of faith and pro-life Americans.” Even a U.S. district judge noted that the FACE Act seemed to “be stretched a little thin” in the case of Houck.
Though Houck was ultimately acquitted by a Pennsylvania jury in January of last year, the Biden administration has sent the clear message to pro-life Americans that they are not safe to freely express their views.
Since Biden took office, the DOJ has also deployed FBI agents to target patriotic parents objecting to far-left content in their school curriculums, sent agents to Catholic parishes to root out alleged “extremist” threats (defined as “traditional” Catholics), and refused to invoke the FACE Act or take any concrete action to stop the onslaught of violent attacks against crisis pregnancy centers, Catholic parishes, and Christian churches.
Meanwhile, left-wing protestors are openly defiling the U.S. Constitution at the National Archives, blocking major highways in support of Hamas-controlled Gaza, illegally invading state legislative chambers, and holding “die-ins” at DMV offices—yet they all do so confident that they will never face anything close to the charges now being levied against the Nashville pro-life activists.
Is it any wonder that Christians and conservatives have lost confidence in the Biden DOJ’s willingness to enforce the law impartially, without fear or favor?
“You wouldn’t be here if the Trump administration was in the White House,” Mark Houck recalled saying to the multitude of agents who stormed his home. As these attacks continue to escalate, Christians’ best hope may be for Trump to return to the executive mansion.
Aaron Flanigan is the pen name of a writer in Washington, D.C.
