Justices Bar Use of Klan Law to Stop Abortion Protests : Supreme Court: The 6-3 ruling does not preclude states or Congress from taking action to protect clinics.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday stripped the nation’s abortion clinics of the key legal weapon they have used to break up blockades by the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, ruling that an organized campaign to prevent women from obtaining abortions does not violate federal civil rights laws.

In a 6-3 decision, the justices said the post-Civil War law known as the Ku Klux Klan Act can be used to stop attacks based on “racial animus,” but not those motivated by an “opposition to abortion.”

“Whether one agrees or disagrees with the goal of preventing abortion, that goal in itself does not remotely qualify for such harsh description (as racial animus) and for such derogatory association with racism,” said Justice Antonin Scalia for the court.

The ruling not only reverses a series of lower court decisions but appears to leave federal judges without power to intervene in private battles over abortion, even those that turn violent.

It does not, however, preclude action by state courts or by Congress and the incoming Clinton Administration, which are likely to take steps to protect clinics from violent protests.

Over the last decade, federal judges in New York; Atlanta; Buffalo, N.Y.; Wichita, Kan., and other cities have issued broad orders based on the Ku Klux Klan Act to stop clinic blockades and to impose heavy fines on the leaders of Operation Rescue.

But two years ago, Bush Administration attorneys intervened on the side of Operation Rescue and argued that federal law did not give judges the authority to get involved in what it characterized as local disputes.

The high court agreed Wednesday, just one week before President Bush leaves office.

The three dissenting justices--John Paul Stevens, Harry A. Blackmun and Sandra Day O’Connor--said Operation Rescue’s use of “organized and violent mobs . . . presents a striking contemporary example of the kind of zealous, politically motivated, lawless conduct that led to the enactment of the Ku Klux Klan Act in 1871.”

Women’s rights groups angrily denounced the decision. “The Supreme Court today granted a license for this domestic terrorism,” said Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation.

“This ruling is an open invitation to anti-choice vigilantes to escalate the brutal and menacing assaults on women seeking reproductive health care,” said Kate Michelman, president of the National Abortion Rights Action League.

But Operation Rescue leader Randall Terry labeled the ruling “a great victory for pro-lifers and a major setback for the child-killing industry. The most potent weapon the child killers had against us . . . has been snatched from their hands and smashed to pieces.”

Wednesday’s ruling did not deal with the basic right to choose abortion. In June, the court, on a 5-4 vote, reaffirmed the principle that government officials may not prevent a woman from terminating a pregnancy.

Moreover, the ruling does not leave clinics without any protection from militant protesters. State judges can issue similar injunctions under state laws against those who trespass or block a business entrance.

Last year, the California Legislature passed a new law that makes it a crime to prevent anyone from entering a health care facility, church or school.

“Wichita-type blockades will not be tolerated in California,” said state Controller Gray Davis, a sponsor of the law.

Congress is also expected to consider a bill that would add new criminal and civil penalties for anyone who intentionally blocks another person from entering a health care facility.

“With Bill Clinton in the White House, we’re hopeful that measure will now become law,” said Marcia Greenberger, co-president of the National Women’s Law Center.

During the campaign, Clinton promised women’s groups that he would not allow clinics to be shut down by mob violence. As President, Clinton could send in federal marshals to protect clinics and their patients in an extreme situation.

At first glance, the abortion clinic case seems to present a simple legal issue.

In 1989, Operation Rescue undertook a series of human blockades of abortion facilities in Washington and the suburban communities of northern Virginia. Attorneys for the National Organization for Women’s Legal Defense Fund asked a federal judge to intervene, and an injunction was issued under the authority of the 1871 law.

It prohibited the anti-abortion activists from trespassing on clinic property or blocking their entrances. Violators were to be imprisoned and fined $1,500 for each violation.

A federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., upheld the injunction because the protesters “had crossed the line from persuasion into coercion and operated to deny the exercise of rights protected by law.”

But the justices agreed to hear an appeal filed on behalf of Jane Bray, an Operation Rescue activist. The case forced the justices to reconsider the reach of the 122-year-old law.

In the years after the Civil War, newly freed slaves were attacked by white mobs and state officials in the South did little to protect them. In response, Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1871, also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act. It gave federal judges the power to intervene when “two or more persons conspire . . . for the purpose of depriving any person or class of persons of . . . equal privileges or immunities under the laws.”

In recent decades, however, the court has felt compelled to limit the scope of the law somewhat. If read literally, for example, it could allow lawsuits against union organizers who boycotted an anti-union company, or perhaps even against civil rights protesters who engaged in “sit-ins” at white-only lunch counters.

In the 1971 case of Griffin vs. Breckenridge, the court said a plaintiff could invoke the Ku Klux Klan Act only against conspirators who were driven by “some racial, or perhaps otherwise class-based, invidiously discriminatory animus.”

Wednesday’s decision turned on those words.

Before the high court, the NOW attorneys had contended that the militant opposition to abortion amounted to “class-based animus” toward women because only they need abortions. Scalia and the majority disagreed. “Whatever one thinks of abortion, it cannot be denied that there are common and respectable reasons for opposing it, other than hatred or condescension toward women as a class,” Scalia wrote in the case (Bray vs. Alexandria Women’s Health Clinic, 90-985). “Men and women are on both sides of the issue.”

His opinion was joined in full by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Byron R. White and Clarence Thomas. All four voted last year to revoke the right to abortion.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy also agreed but issued a separate statement suggesting that the Justice Department retains the power to intervene against “organized lawless conduct” by militant protesters.

In a long separate opinion, Justice David H. Souter said he agreed with most of the ruling because of the 1971 precedent, but he left open the possibility that the law could be used in cases where local law enforcement is overwhelmed by militant protesters.