SCOTUS smacks down anti-choicers

This is very good news indeed. The Supreme Court has refused to take up the appeal of anti-abortion activists who were ordered by a lower court to pay $5 million in damages to doctors featured on "Wild-West style" wanted posters and a website identifying doctors who perform abortions. Thus ends a decade-long battle between the targeted doctors and the "American Coalition of Life Activists."

The Coalition has always argued that the posters were "not threatening" and that the 1994 Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, which criminalized threatening and inciting violence against abortion doctors, encroached upon their free speech rights. By dismissing their appeal, the SCOTUS has, blissfully, treated both of those arguments with the contempt they so richly deserve.

Jessica at Feministing also notes, in response to the contention that the posters aren't threatening:

Tell that to Dr. Bayard Britton, who was shot and killed (along with his bodyguard) outside a Florida clinic after his name appeared on a similar poster.

Which puts me in mind of Dr. George Tillman, who was shot (not fatally) in 1993 by a radical anti-choicer and currently finds himself the target of an Operation Rescue campaign, promulgated by Focus on the Family, which suffers from a "a creepy lack of any discouragement from violence." Considering the movement's history, no less Dr. Tillman's, the dearth of discouragement, coupled with the exhortation, "It's high time that this man is held accountable for his actions that have caused untold misery and loss of life," is indeed troubling. It seems that although the wanted posters must necessarily go the way of the dodo, the motive behind them remains consternatingly attendant.

(Crossposted at AlterNet PEEK.)