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A pro-life activist in Denver is challenging state and local laws that prohibit counseling women within 100 feet of an abortion clinic, which she says violates her constitutional rights.
Wendy Faustin filed a lawsuit June 1 in Colorado’s U.S. District Court against Democratic Governor Jared Polis and other state and local officials regarding a 1993 “bubble law” that she says violates the First Amendment and its 14th amendment. to equal protection.
“The basic idea is that freedom of speech means that the government can’t suppress or silence messages it doesn’t like; it can’t punish people who express those messages,” Roger Byron, lead attorney in Faustin’s case, told Fox News Digital.
“That kind of government action is blatantly unconstitutional. The whole point of the First Amendment is to prevent that sort of thing. And yet, what we have here in Colorado and Denver is a law and an ordinance that does just that,” Byron said, representing Faustin on behalf of the Plano-based nonprofit First Liberty Institute.
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Wendy Faustin filed a lawsuit June 1 in Colorado’s U.S. District Court against Democratic Governor Jared Polis and other state and local officials regarding a 1993 “bubble law” that prohibits counseling outside of abortion clinics. (First Freedom Institute)
Faustin, who believes “abortion is a horrific moral error,” has been protesting outside abortion clinics for decades, but she says Colorado’s eight-foot buffer law erode her constitutional rights and forces her to yell at women who enter abortion clinics instead of a conversation with them, according to the suit.
Byron said the laws have made free speech outside abortion clinics “essentially impossible”.
“Under these laws, it is a crime to be within 100 feet of the door of an abortion center or to come within eight feet of another person to hand her a pamphlet telling her how to get help,” Byron said. .
Similar laws exist in Maine, Massachusetts, and Montana.
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Democrat Colorado Governor Jared Polis was one of several government figures named in Wendy Faustin’s lawsuit. (Andy Cross/Denver Post via Getty Images)
The The Supreme Court upheld Colorado’s bubble law in 2000 on the grounds that the law regulated where speech could take place and not speech itself.
Faustin’s case acknowledges that the result she seeks “contradicts current prevailing precedent as set forth by the majority opinion in (the 2000 case),” the lawsuit says. “But for the reasons explained by the dissent in that case and in subsequent Supreme Court precedent, that case was wrongly decided, inconsistent with intervening precedent, and seriously distorted First Amendment doctrines.”
“These laws would have been struck immediately if they had restricted the strike of anti-war protesters or union members outside their employer’s premises,” said Byron, who claimed there are now, in effect, “two first amendments” in the US.
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“There’s the real First Amendment that protects your basic civil rights, including freedom of speech, and then there’s the other First Amendment that applies to those who advocate the pro-life position, and it’s used to protect their freedom of speech. underfoot,” he said. said.
The U.S. Supreme Court upheld Colorado’s bubble law in 2000 on the grounds that the law regulated where speech could take place, not speech itself. (Doug Pensinger/Getty Images)
Byron said he hopes the precedent set in Canada, where bubble laws have been extended to things like drag shows, doesn’t trickle down to the US, though he worries that such laws could eventually spread to ideologies beyond abortion.
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“Dr. (Martin Luther) King said that injustice everywhere threatens justice everywhere, and he was right, and that certainly applies to freedom of speech,” he said. “If the free speech of Ms. Faustin and others with a pro-life stance can be trampled and set aside, anyone can. No one’s rights are safe.”
Jon Brown is a writer for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to jon.brown@fox.com.
