I came across this link via Feministing’s Weekly Feminist Reader (a weekly weekend trove of articles and news on feminist [and queer and class and race] issues) and was intrigued:

[Anti-choice protester Joseph Logsdon] will get a chance to prove in court that police violated his rights when they arrested him during a protest outside a Cincinnati abortion clinic.

Ah, the home town. I grew up in Cincinnati, which is considerably more conservative than my current home, Portland (and, as my father likes to say about his own hometown, Dayton OH, “an excellent place to be from“). Still, the article itself didn’t immediately scream “anti-choice bias!” at me. Feministing offered up the link in the following frame:

An anti-choice protester wins his appeal after being arrested outside a clinic. His lawyer said, “It struck a very positive tone for a pro-life protestor [sic]. In most courts around the country, they are treated like they are maniacs.” Gee, wonder why that is?

I don’t disagree with Feministing’s basic point here (at least, not their basic point as I read it)– anti-choice protesters generally support a lunatic platform that is hugely detrimental to women’s health. They linked in their blurb, too, to a recent post on the incredibly creepy memorializing by “pro-life” activists of violence against abortion providers– a connection which is maybe a little alarmist in this guy’s case, but definitely not an unreasonable parallel to draw when discussing the trend in louder and more daring anti-choice protests.

That said, I don’t see the fact that Joseph Logsdon won his appeal as a feminist issue one way or another, except in that we should be celebrating our civil rights.

While his lawyer casts it as a recognition of the sanity of a “pro-life protestor[sic]”, a quick read of the actual article implies instead that the decision just dealt with whether or not Cincinnati police violated the protester’s constitutional rights when they arrested him for trespassing at the clinic. A read-through of the decision itself [PDF download] also inclines me to believe that the court decided rightly in this case, although my opinion is, admittedly, informed by a non-lawyerly understanding of the law.

See, the case isn’t about whether or not anti-choice protesters are nuts. It’s about whether or not the Cincinnati police should have arrested Logsdon for trespassing at the Cincinnati Women’s Services Clinic (side note: this clinic is a scant two miles from where I went to high school), given that they weren’t present when the trespass occurred and (allegedly) ignored the input of witnesses when making the arrest. The case also isn’t a blanket statement of approval for Logsdon, an unqualified “win”: it just says that he should– and will– have the chance to argue his side of the story in court. My resident lawyer not-quite-lawyer says he seems unlikely to win the actual case. Plus, I have to admit here to a certain wariness towards the Cincinnati police when considering whether they might have ignored someone’s civil rights. After all, in 2001 their apparent disregard for a young black man’s rights sparked race riots.

So where does that leave us? In short, I wouldn’t be too quick to say that this decision was a bad thing, let alone a decision that set back women’s rights or supported anti-choice activism. All the decision says is that protesters have civil rights, too, even when they do some stupid things. I can’t disagree with that in good conscience, just as I can’t look too negatively on the ACLU defending the Phelps from a charge of “flag desecration”. The Phelps have an incredibly hateful, vicious, ridiculous message, and we should all wish they’d pick a more decorous way of presenting it, but they still have a constitutional right to say what they do. Likewise, Joseph Logsdon may be protesting in favor of a miserable women’s health policy and a culture of enforced conformity and religious oppression, but he has a right to be treated fairly by the police.

I’m not trying to say Feministing hates the constitution. They don’t. But their presentation of this case is a little misleading, and while I hope Logsdon stops harassing the people at the Cincinnati Women’s Services Clinic, he at least has the right to make his case in court. And that’s the way it should be.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, July 8th, 2007 at 5:46 pm and is filed under Feminism, Linkblogging, Politics, Reproductive Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.