Operation Rescue: What Legacy of Disobedience?
On January 13, 1993 the United States Supreme Court overturned a lower court decision allowing the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act, enacted to protect blacks against conspiracies violating their civil rights, to be applied to the blockading of abortion clinics by Operation Rescue. While the anti-Klan law was a protection against organized hatred directed at blacks as a race, Justice Antonin Scalia's majority opinion in Bray v. Alexandria Women's Health Clinic rejected the notion that efforts to impede aborton were equivalent to animosity against the class of women.