The FACE Act Is Unconstitutional. It’s Past Time Congress Got Rid Of It

Just this year, the Department of Justice under Attorney General Merrick Garland, a Biden appointee, has announced indictments of 22 peaceful pro-life protesters, trumping up bogus charges based on the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act. At best, that law creates duplicative protections against crimes that are already prosecutable under state and local criminal statutes. At worst, it is a weapon for federal law enforcement to unconstitutionally brandish against its political dissidents.

Right now, it has become the latter. It’s past time for Congress to repeal the FACE Act and do away with the reckless, state-sponsored terrorizing of innocent Americans that the law enables.

Provisions of the FACE Act

Passed in 1994, the FACE Act criminalizes anyone who:

…by force or threat of force or by physical obstruction, intentionally injures, intimidates or interferes with or attempts to injure, intimidate or interfere with any person because that person is or has been, or in order to intimidate such person or any other person or any class of persons from, obtaining or providing reproductive health services…

It’s worth noting that the phrase “reproductive health services” does not single out abortion facilities, but legally includes pro-life pregnancy centers. The DOJ, however, has yet to announce a single indictment for the dozens of attacks on pregnancy centers that followed the leak of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision that overturned Roe v. Wade.

The statute also criminalizes the same behavior toward “any person lawfully exercising or seeking to exercise the First Amendment right of religious freedom at a place of religious worship,” and criminalizes intentional damage or destruction to a place of worship or pregnancy-related facility because of the facility’s purpose.

Denial of First and 14th Amendment Rights

On its face, none of the statute’s provisions may seem objectionable (though, as experience has shown, “intimidate” and “interfere” are interpreted well outside their stated definitions). But even properly applied, the law would invite unnecessary and political intervention by federal authorities into situations that could be effectively handled by local authorities.

In more sinister hands, the FACE Act is used to tyrannize law-abiding abortion opponents. Recently, it’s been invoked to send dozens of armed FBI agents to raid the home of pro-life Catholic father Mark Houck and arrest him in front of his wife and children. His crime? After a Planned Parenthood escort repeatedly harassed his young son and ignored Houck’s demands that he stop, Houck’s wife says, he pushed the man away from his child. Legal documents even indicate the action had nothing to do with the facility’s provision of abortions, making the FACE Act inapplicable, but the politicized DOJ has used it to terrorize Houck’s family anyway.

While the FACE Act has teed up left-wing bureaucrats to target pro-lifers, the DOJ has denied equal protection of the laws to pro-life pregnancy clinics, in violation of the 14th Amendment. By refusing to apply the law to protect pregnancy centers (as well as churches) from dozens of instances of