Free-Speech Ruling for Protesters

Re “Justices Rule Abortion Protest Is Free Speech,� Feb. 20:

The people who work at family planning clinics are ordinary Americans. They believe in democracy and the Constitution; they certainly believe in freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. They also believe in a woman’s right to choose. In the past few years, anti-abortion protesters have killed and injured several abortion clinic staff members and firebombed countless clinics. The U.S. Supreme Court, sitting in its pristine work environment, decided that it was unfair to restrict confrontational anti-abortion protesters to 15 feet from a clinic patient or staff member as that person approaches the clinic property.

The justices haven’t the vaguest idea what it’s like outside an abortion clinic. Protests occur several days a week, 52 weeks a year, year after year. Their objective is to prevent patients from seeing their doctors and to intimidate the staffers so they won’t want to work at a clinic. I wonder how the justices would rule if a vociferous group detested certain Supreme Court rulings and protesters had publicly displayed their anger by murdering several seated justices. What if as they walked to their office building each day, the justices were continually harassed by outraged members of this same group. Might they have a different perspective as to how close a screaming protester should be allowed to approach them?

The ruling is ludicrous. It en- courages daily confrontation and violence and heightens anxiety among a dedicated group of health providers. I admire and applaud the single dissenting vote on the court.

ROBERT M. ROCCO, Los Angeles

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Let me exercise my newly granted rights--in the spirit of the “free speech� decision handed down by the Supreme Court--to say that William Rehnquist and the seven mental dwarfs who voted with him for this pseudo-constitutional debacle are a pack of incompetent and ill-informed nitwits whose judicial abilities fall somewhat short of the average correspondence law school gradu- ate’s. While all eight of these pompous ambulance chasers probably lack the sense or decency to grasp the inhumanity, irrespon- sibility and long-range consequences of their judicial decision, we shall presently see the results, as the dogs they’ve unleashed zero-in on citizens seeking to exercise their own right to safety and privacy on the streets, in the clinics, at once-peaceful political gatherings and at the very doorsteps of their own homes.

How say you, august justices? Is that in-your-face enough for you?

WILLIAM D. LANSFORD, Playa del Rey