Over the years, the First Amendment's blanket of tolerance for free speech has been spread over some pretty unpleasant groups -- pornographers, racists, anti-Semites, and so on. But now a line has been drawn by the courts, a line that sets certain extremists beyond the pale of First Amendment discourse. These extremists are, perhaps unsurprisingly, pro-life.
        On February 2, a jury in Oregon ruled against a group of pro-lifers on the grounds that their website, called the "Nuremberg Files," along with two anti-abortion posters constituted "a true threat by one or more of the defendants to do bodily harm, assault, or kill any of the plaintiffs." The defendants were fined $107 million.
        The now infamous Nuremberg site contained a list of 200 abortionists, along with their addresses and information about their families. The "wanted" abortionists were labeled "baby butchers," and those who had been killed were crossed out on the site list. The posters in question were "wanted" posters for abortionists. It asked for "information leading to the arrest, conviction and revocation of license to practice medicine."
           Now, as much as a great number of people, pro-lifers included, disliked the website and posters, the question remains: do they actually warrant criminal prosecution? Both the court and the plaintiffs admitted that "no statement contained in the text...is expressly threatening." So why were the defendants found guilty? Taking into account recent violence against abortionists, the court determined that threats could be inferred from their actions.
        This decision ought to be repugnant to anyone who believes in the validity of the First Amendment, regardless of whether they they are pro-life or pro-choice.  "If we believe in free speech at all, we must limit responsibility to those who commit the acts of violence rather than lay blame on the makers of a website that appears to advocate them. Otherwise, any unpopular speech will be subject to oppression," asserts Suzanna Sherry, Professor of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Law at the University of Minnesota, who is also avidly pro-choice.
        Yet what is even more frigh-tening about this breach of liberty is that none of the defendants actually owned or operated the website in question. The owner, Neal Horsley, who was not among the defendants, attests to the fact the website is solely his creation. In fact, while the lawsuit was filed three years ago, the website is only one and a half years old. Therefore the site, toward which most media attention has been drawn, was, or at least should have been, irrelevant to the case.
        The defendants, then, were convicted solely on the basis of two posters which called for nothing more than information leading to the revocation of the abortionists' medical licenses through the legal process. Undoubtedly the posters are offensive to a large number of people. But if mere offensiveness is legitimate grounds for prosecution, then freedom of speech is utterly meaningless.
        What has happened with these pro-life defendants is that they were convicted by association. As members of an unpopular class of fervent opponents of abortion, they were automatically considered a threat to society. Their conviction was not based on their own personal actions, but rather on their association with others who hold the same views and have committed acts of violence as a result of those views. This type of ruling seems much more congruous with the actions of an Orwellian totalitarian state than with the proper proceedings of the American judicial system. A defendant ought to be judged on the basis of his personal guilt or innocence, not on the basis of actions committed by others who share the same ideology.
        The Oregon Court's decision has done a great disservice to the First Amendment. The Ku Klux Klan is free to say what it likes, pornography will not be banned, neo-Nazi hate groups will not be silenced; yet when it comes to pro-life activists, a limit on free speech seems to be uniquely justified. The pro-choicers are ever-fervent in their rally for liberty --at least so long as they don't have to grant it to their opposition.