Utopia Talk / Politics / Anti Abortion douchbags pardoned

Im better then you 2012 UP Football Champ

Sun Mar 02 21:27:43 and vow more douchebaggery. So it's ok to protest normal average women but cant protest trump/musk or jd vance. http://www...on-trump-doj-protests-00206784 Pardoned anti-abortion activists plan next steps Trump’s FBI and DOJ dropped several ongoing investigations into threats against abortion clinics and issued a new memo signaling reduced enforcement going forward against such acts. President Donald Trump holds up a signed executive order. By Alice Miranda Ollstein 03/02/2025 02:00 PM EST Many of the nearly two dozen people President Donald Trump pardoned in January, who had broken into and blocked access to abortion clinics, are vowing to launch a new wave of civil disobedience. At a recent online event by the anti-abortion group LiveAction, several of the activists released from federal prison said they will resume efforts in the coming months to shut down remaining clinics in America, and they urged fellow abortion opponents to join them. “Get out there, whether it’s outside the clinic or inside, or wherever you need to be to actually prevent unborn children’s lives from being taken,” said Herb Geraghty, a Pittsburgh-based anti-abortion activist who entered a Washington abortion clinic in 2020 to disrupt its operations and implore patients to not terminate their pregnancies. On the heels of the pardons, Trump’s FBI and DOJ dropped several ongoing investigations into threats against abortion clinics and issued a new memo signaling reduced enforcement going forward against such acts. Those developments — along with a new push in Congress to repeal the law Geraghty and others violated — indicate that clinics will reemerge as a front in the battle over abortion access, and a focus of a president who called himself “the most pro-life” in history. Geraghty, who served 17 months of a 27-month sentence before receiving a pardon he attempted to reject, told POLITICO that despite being “traumatized” by prison, his incarceration was worth it and he remains “committed to nonviolent direct action in service of the pro-life cause.” “There’s actual lives being saved every minute you are committing the crime,” he said of the activists’ unauthorized entry into abortion clinics. “Every minute that a rescuer is inside the building, they are not killing babies.” Dani Thayer, left, and Marina Lanae both of Tulsa, Oklahoma, hold pro-choice signs. Dani Thayer, left, and Marina Lanae both of Tulsa, Oklahoma, hold pro-choice signs at the state Capitol, April 13, 2022, in Oklahoma City. | Sue Ogrocki/AP Several others pardoned by Trump said they plan to go into abortion clinics either by force or stealth to “rescue” fetuses. And as they welcome new Justice Department guidance directing officials not to penalize such actions except under “extraordinary circumstances” with “significant aggravating factors, such as death, serious bodily harm, or serious property damage,” they are demanding that state and local law enforcement give them similar leeway. “Get out of our way and let citizens defend children in a way that maybe you aren’t willing to do,” Jonathan Darnel, who was sentenced to 34 months in prison for “use of force and physical obstruction” at a Washington abortion clinic in 2020, said during the event. “If you’re a Christian police officer, a pro-life police officer, you need to commit in your heart not to arrest rescuers that are defending children, leave them be, even if it costs you your job. If you’re not willing to protect the children yourself, let us do it.” Beyond pardoning Darnel, Geraghty and others serving time for violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, the Trump administration also moved to dismiss with prejudice — meaning a future administration can’t revive the cases — charges brought against anti-abortion protesters who blocked access to clinics in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Tennessee. One had barricaded himself in the bathroom of a Philadelphia Planned Parenthood for more than three hours, forcing staff and patients to evacuate for the day and requiring nearly 50 appointments to be rescheduled, many for non-abortion services. Another group of protesters whose charges were dropped had posed as patients to gain access to a northeast Ohio clinic, where they disrupted more than two dozen appointments and “forcefully grabbed a patient’s body and told her not to go through with the abortion,” according to federal court records. The FBI has also recently informed some clinics that it is dropping ongoing federal investigations into threats made against them. Calla Halle, the executive director of A Preferred Women’s Health Center, which operates several clinics in Georgia and North Carolina, said she recently received a call that the agency would be handing off to state authorities its work on a bomb threat one of her clinics received in July. The FBI declined to comment on the case. State authorities have yet to contact her. Halle fears the pardons and new DOJ policy will be “a catalyst for more protesting and more aggressive actions.” “Protesters seem to know that they’re not going to be held accountable,” she said, citing “a lot more boundary-pushing” over the last few weeks. Some anti-abortion activists have gotten multiple citations for trespassing at Halle’s Charlotte, North Carolina, clinic since Trump issued the pardons, and one protester posed as a patient to enter the clinic and attempted to access its administrative office. “The lying, the harassment, the intimidation, it’s definitely amping up,” she said. “There’s less of a deterrent for protesters” in a local trespassing charge than there was in FACE Act charges that could carry a federal prison sentence. Abortions have recently shifted away from the brick-and-mortar clinics the anti-abortion movement has long targeted, and most pregnancy terminations now happen at patients’ homes using medication. Even so, the National Abortion Federation, which supports abortion rights, has tracked a steep increase in violence against clinics, staff and patients since the 2022 Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade. From 2021 to 2022, the group documented a 538 percent increase in people obstructing clinic entrances, a 913 percent increase in stalking of clinic staff, and a 144 percent increase in bomb threats. NAF Chief Program Officer Melissa Fowler said while it’s too soon to have data on incidents since Trump’s pardons and enforcement changes, they have received a spike in requests from clinics for on-site security assessments and trainings. “The pardons are disturbing and infuriating, and they do invite anti-abortion extremists to step up their attacks on providers,” she said. “It really sends a message that you can break certain laws without penalty.” Some of the pardoned individuals are still facing state charges for entering abortion clinics without permission. If convicted, they stand to receive a lighter sentence than the federal charges carried — 30 days compared with several years in prison. Clinics in New York City and Washington where some of the pardoned individuals were arrested over the last few years told POLITICO they, like Halle, have seen an uptick in incidents this year. Two days after the pardons were announced, for instance, volunteers at Washington’s Planned Parenthood clinic told POLITICO that “a particularly aggressive” anti-abortion protester “twice walked close to the door” in a manner staff and patients found intimidating. Monica Migliorino Miller, the director of the anti-abortion group Citizens for a Pro-Life Society who has served time in county jail and federal prison for abortion clinic protests, predicts a “minor revival” in the short term of activists entering or blocking clinics, but not a return to the movement’s “heyday” in the 1980s and 1990s. “Without the threat of the FACE Act, and instead going back to maybe getting penalties like a city citation or a state misdemeanor, there will probably be some increase in rescues in defense of the unborn,” she said. The anti-abortion movement will need time to adjust and rebuild its wing focused on clinics after decades of living under the 1994 law, Miller added. And because the FACE Act remains on the books and has no statute of limitations, many may be deterred by fear of prosecution by a future administration. Paul Vaughn, who was convicted of blocking access to a Tennessee abortion clinic in 2021 and was pardoned by Trump, was more optimistic, telling his fellow abortion opponents at the LiveAction event that the felony charges the Biden administration brought against the group “backfired” and “emboldened us.” “They wanted to spread fear into the church and people that would dare stand up for the unborn,” he said. “And yet, God had other plans.” Another activist charged under the FACE Act, Lauren Handy, stressed that she and the others would have been banned from standing within 1,000 feet of an abortion clinic upon their release from prison. The pardons, however, lifted that restriction. “Being able to have freedom of movement, being able to go back and advocate and rescue, and do whatever I need to do that the lord is calling me to — that’s what I’m very thankful for,” she said. Jason Storms, the leader of the anti-abortion group Operation Save America, told POLITICO he’s convening a conference in South Carolina next month to train the next generation of clinic protesters and debate what tactics the movement should embrace. There is unity on the right, he said, that abortion “needs to be opposed, even to the point of risking arrest or severe persecution,” and that many believe sit-ins inside and outside of clinics and other “acts of interposition” are among the best ways to do that. Several of the pardoned protesters are former members of Operation Save America’s leadership or “dear friends” of the group, Storms confirmed, and they’ve told him since being released from prison that there’s a lot of “enthusiasm” about what they can accomplish with Trump in office. “Some see our tactics as aggressive,” he said in an interview. “We don’t believe they are, of course, not anywhere near as aggressive as what is going on inside of the abortion clinic, where little bodies are being torn to pieces.”

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