Is a lawyer legally or morally responsible for the later actions of those whose rights he defends?

That is the key question that has to be asked before analyzing the current NARAL ad attacking Judge John Roberts.

After all, seven years after he filed a brief arguing that a certain law did not apply in a particular case (a position upheld 6-3 by the Supreme Court), one of those peripherally involved in the case committed a different, much more heinous act of the sort which Judge Roberts had condemned in his brief.

During the 1980s, members of Operation Rescue and other groups sought to prevent abortions by shutting down clinics through human blockades. The protesters massed on the sidewalks outside clinics and tried to stop doctors, nurses and patients from entering. Usually, they overwhelmed the police. However, if police came in force to break up the blockades, the protesters moved on to other clinics.

Keenan noted that in the four years before the Bray case was decided, there had been 48 bombings and arsons of abortion clinics in 24 states.

Defenders of abortion rights looked for a legal weapon to counter the blockades, and they thought they had found it in the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 — originally passed to authorize the federal courts to protect newly freed slaves from violence by whites.

The law applies whenever "two or more persons Â… conspire for the purpose of depriving Â… any persons or class of persons" of their equal rights under the Constitution. It permits judges to issue orders that restrain those who have violated the law.

In 1989, the National Organization for Women sued Operation Rescue in federal court in Alexandria, Va., after a series of clinic blockades. A federal judge ruled that the protesters had conspired to prevent women from obtaining legal abortions, and he issued an order making the protesters subject to arrest if they trespassed near abortion clinics. The U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., upheld that decision.

Operation Rescue lawyers appealed. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, which was closely watched nationwide.

Starr and Roberts notified the court that they would file a brief on the side of Operation Rescue, and they asked for time to argue the issue before the justices. Under U.S. law, the solicitor general's primary job is to represent the federal government before the high court, but the office is also free to intervene in other cases that involve some aspect of federal law.

Roberts appeared before the court, opening his remarks by saying that he was not defending the acts of the protesters. Instead, he argued that the Ku Klux Klan Act did not apply in the context of abortion. The century-old law applied only to a "discriminatory deprivation of rights, not simply the deprivation of rights," he said.

"Opposition to abortion is [not] the same as discrimination on the basis of gender. That's wrong as a matter of law and logic," he said. Many women as well as men oppose abortion, and it is not because they hate women, he argued.

Now let's be quite blunt here -- the position he took was correct. Assigning him the blame for a later abortion clinic bombing by Eric Rudolph is like blaming Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP for the acts of the Weathermen by "encouraging" political activism against racial discrimination by waging a legal campaign against Jim Crow.

How false is the charge in the ad? Consider this from FactCheck.org.

An abortion-rights group is running an attack ad accusing Supreme Court nominee John Roberts of filing legal papers “supporting . . . a convicted clinic bomber” and of having an ideology that “leads him to excuse violence against other Americans” It shows images of a bombed clinic in Birmingham , Alabama .

The ad is false.

And the ad misleads when it says Roberts supported a clinic bomber. It is true that Roberts sided with the bomber and many other defendants in a civil case, but the case didn't deal with bombing at all. Roberts argued that abortion clinics who brought the suit had no right use an 1871 federal anti-discrimination statute against anti-abortion protesters who tried to blockade clinics. Eventually a 6-3 majority of the Supreme Court agreed, too. Roberts argued that blockades were already illegal under state law.

The images used in the ad are especially misleading. The pictures are of a clinic bombing that happened nearly seven years after Roberts signed the legal brief in question.

In other words, the only two facts that are accurate in the ad are that Roberts submitted the brief and that Rudolph blew up the clinic. Any attempt to draw a connection betwee those two events is completely specious.

Actually, one could make an argument that the reaction to the Supreme Court decision was much more directly responsible for Rudolph's violent acts. Virginia prosecuted the protesters for the non-violent blockades (similar to civil rights sit-ins of the 1960s) and obtained convictions for them. Bill Clinton and his pro-abortion cohorts passed the the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE) to authorize the very sort of prosecutions that the pro-abortionists in the Bray case were seeking. Having cut off an effective means of peaceful, non-violent civil disobedience to protest abortion, Rudolph turned to violence. Bill Clinton and company are therefore responsible for the bombing of the Alabama abortuary.

Of course such an argument would be false -- just as false as the NARAL ad. And were we on the pro-life side of the abortion issue to make such an argument, NARAL and its allies would rightly condemn us.

But they are more than willing to lie in the service of their liberal cause.

MORE AT: Michelle Malkin, Sister Toldjah, John Bambenek, All Things Conservative, LyfLines, Jack Lewis, The Unalienable Right, Red State, QandO, bRight & Early, Blogs for Bush, GOPBloggers, Secure Liberty.

Posted by: Greg at 06:10 AM | Comments (15) | Add Comment
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