CV NEWS FEED // Nearly all FACE Act prosecutions have been against pro-lifers, according to data Texas Rep. Chip Roy recently uncovered.
In an Aug. 6 podcast episode, Roy revealed that his office discovered that 205 out of 211 cases have been brought against pro-life protestors since the Act was established in 1994.
Only the remaining six were against pro-abortion activists.
Roy stated in the episode he believes the statistics demonstrate that the FACE Act is “being used as a weapon” against pro-life Americans, despite the law having been allegedly conceived to prosecute those who attempt to block the entries of both abortion clinics and pregnancy resource centers.
In recent years, as the Washington Stand pointed out in its report on the new data, the Biden Administration has come under fire for “misapplying” the FACE ACT to target pro-life individuals demonstrating outside of abortion clinics.
The Stand references several recent cases, including that of 11 pro-lifers who were arrested and charged in 2022 with violating the FACE Act. They had been “peacefully praying and singing hymns while standing and sitting along the walls of a hallway leading to the door of” an abortion clinic.
In April, CatholicVote sent the Department of Justice a letter condemning its biased application of the FACE Act, pointing out that even though the law protects churches in the same way that it protects abortion clinics, the Biden Administration “has refused to prosecute a single act of violence against a Catholic church,” despite numerous instances of firebombing, arson, and physical assaults on priests and parishioners.
The letter came after the DoJ announced that it would prosecute four pro-life activists, including an 87-year-old survivor of the Holocaust, for violating the FACE Act.
Roy argued further in the episode that the Biden Administration’s attacks are not about abortion alone. They’re also about religious liberty.
“I think it’s important to kind of pull up and then look at this from 50,000 feet and just understand where we are in America,” he said. Ultimately, he concluded, the DoJ is “doing it on purpose […] because they want prolifers to be in jail. And everybody needs to know it.”