Anti-abortion activists were exercising free speech rights when they published wanted-style posters branding abortion providers as “baby butchers,” said the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in Throwing Out a Major Anti-Abortion Verdict. I’m as vehement a free speech advocate as anyone, and support the ACLU (as you know if you read this weblog regularly), but the court is just wrong here. The court feels that it’s speech, not an action like, say, conspiracy to murder (which is performed by words too), because the publishers can’t be responsible for what an anonymous reader does. “If defendants threatened to commit violent
acts, by working alone or with others, then their
statements could properly support the verdict.
But if their statements merely encouraged
unrelated terrorists, then their words are
protected by the First Amendment.” But it’s impossible for me to see any purpose in publishing the names, home addresses and license plate numbers of abortion providers, as the publishers of the “Nuremburg Files” webpage in question did, unless you’re suggesting that someone in your audience hunt them down and terrorize or kill them. And, as you know, three doctors whose names were on the list were indeed assassinated, their names triumphally crossed off the list after each deed.

March 19-24, 2001 Aurora Gallery The action began Monday, March 19th, when a coronal mass ejection from the Sun hit
Earth’s magnetosphere. Three days later on Thursday, March 22nd, a weak interplanetary shock wave –the leading edge of a
coronal mass ejection that left the Sun on March 19th– buffeted Earth’s magnetosphere. The impact
sparked a period of high-latitude auroras that dazzled Alaskans and other northerners.