It's the helluva town?

Chicago's tolerance for the annoying is remarkable. Named after a smelly swamp onion of local origin, Chicago has suffered the likes of stockyards and steel mills, Al Capone and Dennis Rodman. And, of course, the Cubs.

Chicago has lived with, even embraced, a long line of agitators, troublemakers, busybodies, scolds and moralizers. It has forborne disruptions, demonstrations and aggravations, from Nazis marching in a predominantly Jewish suburb to Peacenik raids on draft offices. All with the supportive clucking of local and national free speech advocates.

How is it, then, that a Chicago jury, under the watchful eye of a federal judge, decided that none of it was as bad as pro-lifers demonstrating outside abortion clinics? How is it that the jury agreed with the National Organization for Women that such protests are the stuff of organized crime? And without a peep of complaint from the free speech establishment?

Here is a town where Saul Alinsky, the father of community organizing, perfected his Rules for Radicals, a handbook of aggravating tactics that's the prototype for activists throughout the country. "Machiavelli wrote The Prince as a handbook for the Haves on how to hold on to their power. My book is for the Have-Nots on how to take it away," he wrote. In Chicago, Alinsky has been canonized for saving a working class neighborhood through threats, intimidation and assorted works of nonviolent civil disobedience designed to get under the skin of the wealthy and politically powerful.

He hasn't been alone. Nuns and self-described groups of "concerned" clergy and laity, citing a law higher than civil authority, have closed off downtown streets, stopping buses and interrupting commerce, marching for peace and social justice. Feminists, fighting for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, chained themselves in front of the state Senate's door, disrupting the people's right to have their elected representatives deliberate without intimidation. The Fox, an anonymous environmental icon immortalized by the late newspaper columnist Mike Royko, made his point about the industrial pollution of the suburban Fox River by dumping pails of goo in corporate lobbies, to the applause of the high-minded socially conscious.

Dick Gregory gave up his promising career in comedy to picket outside the desolate Criminal Courts building on the Southwest Side on lonely nights for some forgotten cause. For this he was admired. And who will ever forget the thousands of unwashed who argued the moral correctness of turning the town upside down during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and to hell with all those laws about aggravated battery, trespassing, drug possession and incitement to riot.

When the Rev. Martin Luther King brought his moral crusade for civil rights to Chicago, to march down the streets of the most racist part of town, it was correctly judged the job of the police to protect the marchers from the taunts and rocks of the racists, despite the provocative nature of King's enterprise. In Chicago, the Rev. Jesse Jackson established his Operation Breadbasket, a predecessor to Operation PUSH, providing the prototype for boycotts, direct action and nonviolent civil disobedience that not a few of his corporate targets, in an honest moment, would consider to be little more than extortion. The way to break the white economic "colonialism" in the black community, Jackson explained back then, was to "squeeze a company's vitals, which is the profit margin."

To this day, housing activists embarrass slumlords by marching in front of their suburban homes and disrupting the peace. Senior and disabled activists take on City Hall and the local transit authority by disrupting public meetings. And Jackson's direct action last year shut down a parking garage construction site at the popular Museum of Science and Industry to force the hiring of more minorities.

Berkeley may have been memorialized as the birthplace of the '60s free speech movement, but in gritty Chicago, the preachers and lecturers, the blowhards and wiseacres, the dissenters and discordant are as much of a way of life as the stinging January wind off Lake Michigan.

All of this with the active defense, if not the encouragement and blessing, of Chicago's substantial establishment of civil rights and First Amendment activists.

Well, hooray for them. But where were they when Joe Scheidler and his fellow pro-life defendants were convicted of racketeering in the unwarranted, if not unconstitutional, application of a law meant to apply to the thugs and murderers of organized crime? To the shame of First Amendment activists, they were hardly to be found. Those who were heard from soiled their own honorable free speech tradition by praising the jury's decision, and expressing their fondest hope that it would result in the muzzling and bankruptcy of pro-life activists throughout the land.

Thirteen years ago, 700 Chicagoans headed out to Washington D.C. to protest the Reagan administration's policies on nuclear weapons, social programs and apartheid. They joined thousands of demonstrators from 39 other cities that included such groups as the National Organization for Women and Jackson's Operation PUSH. They weren't headed there simply to lobby and picket. Their avowed goal was civil disobedience. They were going there, they proclaimed, to break the law and trample on someone else's rights to govern or do business.

Giving his blessing upon their departure was Chicago's mayor, the late Harold Washington, a hero of civil libertarians and the political left. When Washington issued a statement "wholeheartedly" endorsing and encouraging those activities, no one suggested a financial assault on the meager treasures of these "people of conscience," arguing that their homes, cars and children's college funds should be taken from them because they are the moral equivalent of organized hit men.

Those who would now drop the hammer of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations law on pro-life demonstrators would have been aghast at the thought of using such a law to stifle their kind of social and political protest-the very thing that Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and the nowsilent American Civil Liberties Union warned against when the law was passed.

But such repressive use of the law now becomes the proud legacy of NOW and all the civil rights "advocates" who are content to sit quietly by while protest and non-violent civil disobedience are being stifled-now that the protest and non-violent civil disobedience are being conducted by pro-life activists. The ACLU proudly defended the rights of Nazis to march in Skokie, home to hundreds of Holocaust survivors, but is now willing to sacrifice its free speech creed for the absolute right of women to choose to kill their own children.

We shouldn't be surprised. These were the same people who sat silently by when the repressive Freedom of Access to [Abortion] Clinic Entrances Act of 1994 was passed. The act, aimed exclusively at abortion protesters, is, on its face, content-based infringement of free speech. Not only didn't they oppose the law, free-speech absolutists, such as the ACLU, pushed for its passage.

Such intellectual dishonesty shouldn't be surprising. With the opening of Scheidler's trial, NOW held a press conference in Chicago to equate the "death threats, arson, bombing, stalking, extortion and murder" at abortion clinics with the nonviolent civil disobedience or peaceful protest that the defendants and their allies advocate or practice. NOW peppered its references to the defendants with such descriptions as "terrorists" and "mobsters." How ironic that NOW should hurl such charges while happily oblivious of the violence and brutality practiced within the clinics it defends.

And what were the death threats, arson, bombing, stalking, extortion and murder incidents that the jury attributed to the defendants?

Actually, we'll never know. Under the RICO law, the plaintiffs had to show only two criminal acts to prove a "pattern" of extortion and violence. The jury convicted on 21 counts, but it was never exactly clear what acts they had in mind. "The judge would not require that [the jury] specify precisely what acts they found to be extortion," said Scheidler attorney Thomas Brejcha. "The statute says it must be a pattern [of acts]. But what is a pattern? The judge bought the argument that just about any two [incidents] in ten years makes a pattern.

"They [the plaintiffs] took the position that any blocking of access to an abortion facility was ipso facto a violent act, qualifying it as extortion. They told the jury that the defendants had crazy ideas of violence.... They used the word 'force' interchangeably with 'violence' [so] any kind of blocking of access was an act of force and violence. Even going limp when you were arrested was an act of resistance."

"Anything we did was considered violence," Scheidler said. "Sitting down or standing up, even handing a brochure to a woman. Picketing, singing, praying-apparently they accepted it all."

Blockading entrances? Making too much noise? Clogging the sidewalks? Going where they were unwelcome? Trespassing?

By these measures, the illegal sit-down by civil rights protesters at whiteonly lunch counters would have qualified as extortion and racketeering. And if the court's current interpretation of RICO had been in effect, the civil rights movement would have been in danger of bankruptcy. And so goes NOW's plan. Said NOW in a press release as the trial started: The seeking of a "national injunction" would be a "pro-active step toward guaranteeing the promise of Roe v. Wade.... If the suit is successful, NOW will also ask the court to award triple damages to every clinic in the U.S. affected by the defendants' violence." Added President Patricia Ireland: "If the anti-abortion thugs won't obey the law, we'll go after them where it hurtstheir wallets."

Scheidler, however, seems nonplused about the coming arguments about whether he and the other defendants should pay damages to the nation's 1,200 abortion clinics. They're talking, oh, $50 million, and at triple damages, that's $150 million. Then there are lawyers fees.

"We're trying to tell the judge we don't have the money; my organization was wiped out by the cost of the suit. The transcripts alone were $17,000. Witnesses were tremendously expensive," he said, to fly them in and house them during the lengthy trial.

But, he told me, "I couldn't in conscience give any money to them. How could I? I'd give them some books maybe."

None of it apparently will slow up Scheidler. "I'm going to talk all over the country," he told the press after the verdict. "I imagine I'll be getting all kinds of invitations now that I am a racketeer. Racketeers for Life. I will make lemonade out of this. You watch me."

Other pro-lifers aren't so sure, however. Privately, one activist told me that the verdict will have a chilling effect. After all, she said, most pro-life protesters are simply regular people, who have families, homes and children they want to be able to send to college. Brejcha also described the effect of the decision as a "sub-zero blast."

Even before the verdict, with the passage of FACE in 1994, some feared that activism at abortion clinics had dropped off. Ralph Rivera, legislative chairman of Illinois Citizens for Life predicted that until the Scheidler case runs through its appeals, some pro-lifers will "sit on the sidelines." Indeed, talk quickly started after the verdict that pro-choice and liberal state legislators would be encouraged to move a bill that would make protesters civilly and criminally liable if they block access to abortion clinics. The bill would create a 50-foot protest-free buffer zone around clinics.

Asked if the decision would be a damper on his own efforts, Scheidler sounded undaunted: "Not mine," he replied. He's still giving speeches and is receiving "tremendous support. I'm doing everything the way I did," he said. Indeed, to change now could be construed as an admission that his tactics were anything but peaceful-something that he has steadfastly asserted.

And so what if the judge hands down a nationwide injunction? "How," he asked, "will it be stronger than the FACE law, which already carries some pretty draconian penalties?"

Those aren't the same kind of draconian penalties attached to other protests, though. Clarke D. Forsythe, Scheidler's former attorney, four years ago asked the U.S. Supreme Court to do what two lower courts had done-throw out the suit. The lawsuit, he told the court, was an attempt "to chill or criminalize lawful protest. If social protest that deprives an industry of business constitutes extortion, it would apply to protest against any industry that had an effect on business: environmentalists against the logging industry; AIDS activists against medical organizations; animal rights activists against fur manufacturers and stores, and peace activists against the military weapons industry." The high court turned aside this eloquent argument without comment, leaving it up to Congress now to assert its authority to make it clear that an anti-racketeering law must not apply to legitimate, or even, civil disobedience related to social protest.

Apparently, though, there'll be no groundswell of support for such legislation from gritty, combative Chicagoans. The trial drew a decent amount of news coverage, but not much passionate public reaction, especially in support of peaceful protest and/or civil disobedience. Maybe Chicagoans have just tired of it all, the shouting back and forth of both sides of the abortion issue. Maybe they're more interested in the booming economy and the championship Bulls.

Or perhaps they weren't whipped up by the media in defense of civil protest, as they usually are when it comes to defending the Jesse Jacksons and other protesters of the political left. Chicago's two major daily newspapers, the Sun-Times and Tribune, expressed grave concerns in editorials about the jury's verdict, but that was about it in the public outrage department.

Perhaps it was because reporters and editors who usually are attuned to offenses against free speech didn't get their customary cues from their sources in the now-silent civil liberties community. If so, it is sad testimony to the extent to which the media today is shepherded by their sources and their lack of independence. Perhaps, a part of it also, is the Chicago media's image of Scheidler as the principal, if not sole, pro-life spokesman-a person generally not well-regarded by the media.

Defeated Democratic gubernatorial nominee Dawn Clark Netsch, a prochoice feminist, may have unwittingly put her finger on it when she suggested that the ruling might encourage pro-lifers to find a spokesman other than Scheidler. "I would think there would be an effort to find a spokesman who has more credibility and is not involved in any of this trying to close down the clinics and trying to bring about harm to other people."

Such a statement, which went unchallenged in the press, is a dismal revelation of ignorance on the part of the Chicago media and politicians about the highly textured fabric of pro-life advocates. They run from feminists to legal experts, from religious to the secular. Often they can't agree on tactics or strategy. Neither Netsch nor the media seem inclined to pay much attention to these other spokespersons, to seek them out, let alone to listen.

When it comes to protecting the free speech and protest rights of pro-life advocates, I am afraid that the intellectual curiosity and the moral passion that for generations have characterized combative Chicago are dead.

Apparently not everyone is dissuaded by the verdict to give up being moved by a higher law to engage in civil disobedience. I give you the Rev. Katherine Hancock Ragsdale, an Episcopalian priest from Arlington, Mass. She was reacting to congressional legislation that would make it harder for teenagers to go out of state for abortions without their parents' knowledge. The bill is designed to ensure that state laws requiring parental consent or notification of a minor's abortion are not circumvented by adults who take a girl to another state for an abortion without telling her parents.

Ragsdale, chairwoman of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, finds the proposed law abhorrent, and freely acknowledged that she recently drove a 15-year-old girl to Boston for an abortion. That wasn't across a state line, but Ragsdale defiantly said she would risk a jail term to help other girls get an abortion.

"If helping young women like her should be made illegal, I will nonetheless continue to do it. I took vows."

Dennis Byrne is a regular columnist and editorial-board member at the Chicago Sun-Times.

Copyright Human Life Foundation, Incorporated Summer 1998
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