A legal brief filed by Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson helps illustrate how leftists have an objectively disordered view of “protests.”
It’s a view in which rioters looting local stores, torching cars, and assaulting security guards are seen as “mostly peaceful protests,” while nuns and old ladies praying outside abortion clinics are seen as frightening and dangerous. The brief Jackson co-wrote against the latter has proved an early rallying point for conservatives against her nomination.
To be clear, Jackson has an admirable history of personally eschewing the more dramatic forms of protest. Yet she has described that reluctance as a judgment of practicality and efficacy, not as a determination that vociferous protest somehow violates the rights of others.
Except, that is, when the protesters are opposing abortion. In the case of McGuire v. Reilly, Jackson was a lead attorney for a NARAL state chapter and a consortium of other self-styled women’s and reproductive health groups filing a friend-of-the-court brief in favor of a Massachusetts state law. The law prohibited anti-abortion protesters, but not pro-abortion counselors, from coming within six feet of someone near an abortion clinic “for the purpose of passing a leaflet or handbill to … or engaging in oral protest, education, or counseling” — presumably to dissuade that person from securing an abortion.
Set aside for now the constitutional merits and demerits of the law or of the lawsuit against it. Likewise, set aside what, if anything, Jackson’s involvement says about her overall fitness for the Supreme Court. Instead, what’s more broadly instructive is how her legal brief exemplifies the skewed view most leftists have about protests. For them, the antifa and Black Lives Matter street violence are noble, and the “hecklers’ veto” against on-campus speakers is a favorite and honored tool of “canceling” unwanted opinions.
Yet when it comes to anti-abortion protesters, a rare few of whom may be actually menacing but who by the tens of thousands across the country tend to offer prayers and assistance rather than condemnation, Jackson and her fellow leftists lay it on thick.
The ordinary approach of those pleading with women not to kill the living, very human being within them is to offer leaflets advising where they can secure loving prenatal care and other assistance for motherhood. Jackson’s brief, though, makes the norm sound like this: “a gauntlet through a hostile, noisy crowd … swarming around them, shouting in their faces, blocking their way, and thrusting disturbing photographs and objects at them. … She may have to endure physical and emotional intimidation, heightened stress … unwanted exposure, and violations of personal space.”
As on college campuses, unwanted speech is treated by leftists as equivalent to violence, whereas actual violence on putative behalf of a favored cause is at worst an unfortunate by-product, as with the proverbial eggshells that must be cracked to make omelets. Whereas all sorts of inflammatory conduct on behalf of woke values is styled as mere “expression,” Jackson’s brief labels anti-abortion protests as “conduct, not pure speech.” And this is not to mention what conservative legal activist Kelly Shackelford, writing at Foxnews.com, describes as leftists “ignoring the very real hostility — whether from abusive partners, parents, or peers — that can coerce reluctant women into the abortion decision.”
The double standard’s blatancy is astonishing.
Granted, some elements on the political Right exercise similar double standards when their own “side” is protesting, such as with the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021. The reality is that both sets of double standards are ethically atrocious. The Left, though, tends far more often to want the organs of a powerful government to enshrine their double standard into law — especially by Supreme Court justices. Such a law backed by the compulsive force of government can be dangerous indeed.
