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"Eleanor McCullen’s Day at the Court" —Prof. Hadley Arkes in The Catholic Thing
By The James Wilson Institute •
Posted on Feb 11 2014
Writing in The Catholic Thing, Prof. Hadley Arkes discusses the recently argued case before the Supreme Court of McCullen v. Coakley. Prof. Arkes and several of his students attended the oral argument.
Some excerpts:
"What the students heard that day was the appeal for the sainted Eleanor McCullen. She has worked for years, standing outside of abortion clinics, drawing young women into a conversation, and gently persuading them to let their babies live. But she was blocked now by a statute in Massachusetts that forbade anyone from 'knowingly' entering an area 'within a radius of 35 feet' of a 'reproductive health care facility” – which is to say, a facility designed to block reproduction.'"
"It made the most profound difference, then, when Ms. Jennifer Miller rose to defend the law in Massachusetts now in McCullen v. Coakley and say that 'petitioners can and do protest abortion in Massachusetts. . .in the public spaces right outside abortion facilities.' Justice Scalia sprang instantly: 'This is not a protest case,' he insisted. 'These people don’t want to protest abortion. They want to talk to the women who are about to get abortions and talk them out of it. [I]t distorts it to say that what they want to do is protest abortion.'"
"Fourteen years earlier, in Hill v Colorado, Justice Stevens upheld the ban on pro-lifers by invoking a constitutional 'right to be left alone.' But that was a right invoked in the past to ward off intrusions into the private home, as through wire taps. And yet for years the Court had protected the right of political and religious hawkers to press their views on strangers in the street, who found the overtures unwelcome and offensive. But here, as elsewhere, there would a zone cut out, removing the pro-lifers from the constitutional protections afforded to everyone else. The statute in Massachusetts will probably be struck down, but the question is: will the Court simply quibble over the difference between thirty-five feet and eight feet, or will it strike closer to the core of the problem by overruling that precedent in Hill v. Colorado?"
Read the whole piece here