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Appeals Court Finds "Nuremberg Files" Site Unlawful
Greplaw writes "The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled this evening that an anti-abortion website that featured "wanted" posters of various abortion doctors constituted a "true threat." The website, called The Nuremberg Files, is therefore not protected by the First Amendment and is illegal under a 1994 law prohibiting threats against abortion doctors. The full opinion of the court is available on Findlaw. This case marks one of the first times that a website has been ruled to constitute such a threat." Our previous story has the background on the case. The District Court found the website was an unlawful threat; a three-judge panel of the Appeals court found that it wasn't; and now the entire Appeals court has found, by a 6-5 vote, that it was indeed unlawful. The case could be appealed to the Supreme Court next. The accepted definition of a threat unprotected by the First Amendment is one which "on its face and in the circumstances in which it is made is so unequivocal, unconditional, immediate and specific as to the person threatened, as to convey a gravity of purpose and imminent prospect of execution", and there is considerable dissent among the judges over whether a website can or cannot meet that standard.
That you consider this to be "the crux of the issue" strongly suggests that your problem with abortion isn't the harming of innocent life, but that "those damned heathens are out there fornicating and I don't have any way to stop it!"
This is the sole reason why I (and many other moderates, I suspect) refuse to support the pro-life movement. A non-trivial number of pro-lifers aren't so much concerned with the life of the unborn child as they are about meteing out punishment to those who dared to engage in intercourse out of wedlock. If there were such fervor for the well-being of the child after birth as well as before it, then the protest-outside-of-clinics crowd would be picketing in the streets every time the local department of family services allowed a child to die at the hands of an abusive caregiver.
Instead, we often see a rather jolting shift in attitude after the birth of a child. What once was "a most holy and blessed fetus, not to be harmed in any way" suddenly becomes "the spawn of a welfare whore, sucking at the teat of government entitlement programs at the cost of productive taxpayers like you and me."
Of course, many (probably most) pro-lifers can stomach this hypocrisy as little as I can, and donate their time and money to protect children after birth as well as before. Yet the pro-life movement will never achieve any meaningful goals until it drives zealots like those behind the "Wanted: Dead or, umm, Dead" Nuremburg posters out of the movement.