The Biden-Harris administration did not prosecute a single one of the hundreds of attacks against churches that took place last year under a 1994 law designed to protect houses of worship, a congressional hearing established on Wednesday, citing research from Family Research Council. Even as violence and vandalism against churches and pro-life centers skyrocketed over the last two years, 92% of Biden administration cases using that law targeted pro-life advocates.
Those facts emerged Wednesday during a House Judiciary hearing about the implementation of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, signed by President Bill Clinton in 1994. The FACE Act explicitly punishes anyone who “intentionally damages or destroys the property of a place of religious worship” in 18 U.S. Code §248(a)(3), imposing a $10,000 fine and a jail sentence of up to six months for a first conviction. Each subsequent conviction can add $25,000 in fines and up to 18 months in prison for nonviolent protests, or up to 10 years if the defendant is convicted of causing any bodily injury.
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“Since the start of the Biden-Harris administration until May 2024, the DOJ had brought a total of 24 FACE Act prosecutions against 55 defendants, with only two of these cases concerning attacks on pregnancy resource centers. To this day, the FACE Act has never been used in defense of a church since it was passed in 1994,” said the subcommittee chairman Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas). In all, 50 of the 55 defendants were pro-life, and the department obtained 34 convictions, according to data from the Biden Justice Department.
“Statues of Lady Justice show her wearing a blindfold, because it is not supposed to matter who is being judged, what they believe, or who they voted for. Unfortunately, over the last four years, the Biden-Harris administration has weaponized this act [through] disproportionately targeting pro-life Americans for FACE Act violations while simultaneously failing to protect pregnancy resource facilities, despite being the target of growing violence,” said Roy.
Although the law putatively covers churches, it has never been used to protect America’s first freedom as churches come increasingly under attack after the May 2022 leak of the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade.
“The Family Research Council identified 436 attacks on churches just in 2023,” testified Erin Hawley, senior counsel and vice president at the Alliance Defending Freedom. “Last year, Arielle Del Turco with the Family Research Council reported to this committee over 400 incidents of hostile acts directed at churches … including hundreds of acts of vandalism, dozens of arson attacks, and incidents involving guns or bomb threats.”
“There have been zero — zero — prosecutions under the FACE Act for that violence,” noted Hawley.
“Those who hate wisdom love death,” said Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.), paraphrasing Proverbs 8:36. “And I think that’s what we’re dealing with here.”
Technically, the report — “Hostility Against Churches Is on the Rise in the United States | Analyzing Incidents from 2018-2023” by Del Turco — documented 436 church attacks during the first 11 months of 2023, a whopping 800% increase over six years.
FRC also documented 67 acts of violence or vandalism against pro-life pregnancy centers between the Dobbs decision leak and May 2023, 39 assaults against pro-life churches by October 2022, and 24 attacks on pro-life organizations by January 2023. Hawley cited some specific attacks:
Hawley cited numerous other hostile acts against pro-life women’s centers in her unabridged, written testimony.
Pregnancy resource centers make a “strange target,” since they’re giving away diapers and baby formula for free, noted Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Calif.).
At the hearing, Hawley and her fellow witnesses detailed ways “the Biden administration has weaponized the [FACE] Act to target pro-life individuals,” said Hawley. “The Biden DOJ has upped the ante, placing pro-life Americans in as much jeopardy as possible.” Steve Crampton, senior counsel at the Thomas More Society, noted that the Biden administration has invoked the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 “for the first time in our nation’s history” to accuse pro-life advocates of engaging in a “conspiracy against rights.”
The act increases the jail sentence for a nonviolent first violation from six months to more than 10 years in prison.
One of the people facing the barrel of a federal gun was pro-life advocate Paul Vaughn, arrested in 2022 for a pro-life demonstration in Tennessee. After Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-Pa.) invoked Project 2025, Vaughn replied, “I would like to tell you about the DOJ’s Project 2022. It happened on October 5, 2022, at approximately 7:15 in the morning, when my house was assaulted, my wife and children were terrorized, and I was kidnapped at gun point by four armed men.”
“Lethal force was abused to abridge my God-given and constitutionally secured rights. At the moment of being placed in handcuffs, I became a slave to ideological tyrants, either the ones holding the weapons or the ones they obeyed,” remembered a traumatized Vaughn. “The process is the punishment.”
“Government has been weaponized against We the People,” said Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), citing the similar arrest of pro-life advocate Mark Houck by heavily armed federal agents in front of his wife and seven children.
Reps. Scanlon and Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) held that the disparate enforcement of the law came about because pro-life advocates violate it more often. Yet one study found pro-life centers were 22 times more likely to be attacked than abortion facilities.
Despite that evidence, President Joe Biden formed the Reproductive Rights Task Force, led by Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta, in July 2022 to combat state pro-life protections and prosecute sidewalk counselors. “DOJ continues to robustly enforce the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act,” boasted a “fact sheet” from the White House Task Force on Reproductive Healthcare Access. Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, stated last December that the entire department is “working to ensure that prosecutors across the country are equipped to bring FACE Act cases. And we have emphasized that Civil Rights Division attorneys are always available for consultation and technical assistance.”
Targeting peaceful pro-life Christians singing hymns in the lobby of an abortion facility seems unusual “in an atmosphere where we’re told police officers should deescalate” for violent criminals, noted outgoing Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.). “That must stop, and I guarantee you they will stop in the next administration.”
“I can assure you, we will have justice back in America on January 20,” agreed Rep. Wesley Hunt (R-Texas).
When pro-abortion domestic terrorists are prosecuted, they tend to get lighter sentences than required by law. Judge William Conley, an Obama appointee, sentenced the man who confessed to firebombing the Wisconsin Family Action in May 2022, Hridindu Sankar Roychowdhury, to 7.5 years rather than the 20-year maximum sentence allowed by federal law.
“While we expect the incoming administration to end this horrific practice of the DOJ, that is not good enough. The American people deserve to know that their rights are not going to be abused no matter which administration is in power,” said Roy.
Roy introduced the FACE Act Repeal Act of 2023 (H.R. 5577), which would apply to any FACE Act prosecution underway at the time of its passage, last September. The legislation currently has 47 cosponsors, including Reps. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), Chris Smith (R-N.J.), Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), and Greg Steube (R-Fla.).
Crampton noted that, since Roe v. Wade has been repealed, the FACE Act guards a non-existent right. “There is therefore no federal constitutional right to abortion, and the very reason for FACE’s existence no longer exists. Under the well-established doctrine of cessante ratione legis, cessat ipsa lex, ‘when the reason for a law ceases, the law itself ceases,’” he testified.
“Today’s hearing on the FACE Act should highlight how it has been repeatedly weaponized by corrupt bureaucrats and officials against peaceful pro-life advocates. The committee should call on their colleagues to abolish this federal law if it will continue to be unevenly applied by pro-abortion radicals in government to punish peaceful pro-life activists while attacks on pregnancy centers and churches continue unabated,” said Tommy Valentine, director of the Catholic Accountability Project at CatholicVote, in a statement emailed to The Washington Stand. “We hope that under President Trump’s watch, true impartiality and justice will be restored to our governing agencies, and the exploitation of governmental power which we have seen run rampant under the Biden administration will no longer be tolerated.”
Democrats on the committee accused Republicans of stoking violence against abortionists by repealing the 1994 law.
“The motivation here is very clear: In repealing the FACE Act, they would invite every anti-abortion extremist to use violence, threats, intimidation, to block access to abortion nationwide,” said Scanlon. “They knowingly enable dangerous and hostile rhetoric … and ultimately, that makes them complicit in the consequences of those actions.”
“Anti-abortion extremists continue to use violence, threats, and disruption to curb access to abortion, so Republicans want to repeal the law that protects … from these ongoing threats,” claimed Nadler.
But the Thomas More Society holds that the act is unconstitutional and must be overturned on the grounds of sound jurisprudence.
Roy said the next administration “must act to reverse these wrongful imprisonments, reuniting families who have been collateral damage of this administration. The Trump administration should consider pardoning and commuting” the sentences of those wrongfully targeted.
President-elect Donald Trump has promised to pardon peaceful pro-life advocates and other “political prisoners” who have been convicted of FACE Act violations or similarly trumped-up federal charges. “I will appoint a special task force to rapidly review the cases of every political prisoner who’s been unjustly persecuted by the Biden administration … so that I can study the situation very quickly and sign their pardons or commutations on day one,” promised President Trump, who then sought the Republican presidential nomination, in his address to the 2023 Pray Vote Stand Summit. “Never again will the federal government be used to target religious believers.”
“I will govern by a simple motto: Promises made, promises kept,” said Trump in his 2024 victory speech.
“Unequal application of the law is not truly law; it is tyranny imposed on those [who] didn’t have the power by those who do have it. That’s contrary to everything we believe as Americans,” said Roy. The Democratic administration’s history of unequal prosecution and protection highlights the need for “permanent and fundamental reforms at the Department of Justice.”
LifeNews Note: Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.
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