“I think the [programming time slots] are based on a combination of the populations the channels serve and the anticipated backlash airing them will provoke.” Fadiman said her films depict a world that has passed but that many would like to see return and so they’re full of relevant information that has been forgotten or hidden from view. “Individual programmers like the people in Denver have the courage and imagination to see the information in the films as vital.”

Lola Huth, a dancer featured in the film who died of a self-induced miscarriage

The topic is as hot as ever in Colorado, where one of the region’s only remaining late-term abortion providers still works and where every major Republican candidate has embraced the so-called personhood ballot measure that would not only outlaw abortion but certain fertility procedures as well. As many legal analysts have argued, in seeking to grant fertilized human eggs the full spectrum of citizen rights, the initiative would set up contesting legal interests between women and the eggs in their wombs.

Fadiman’s trilogy was originally released in the early 1990s but she said she was moved to bring it out again by the recent violent upswing among opponents of abortion. “After the late-term abortion provider Dr Tiller’s death in Kansas, I realized these had to be re-released. We updated the third film [The Fragile Promise of Choice] with information from this year, including the murder of Dr Tiller. I felt I had to alert a new generation to the dangers, the danger women are up against.”

The first film, “When Abortion Was Illegal,” weaves together stories of women who experienced illegal abortions with those of doctors who risked imprisonment and of activists who broke the law to help women seeking abortions.

The second film, “From Danger to Dignity,” combines archival footage with interviews with physicians, legislators, clergy and early women’s rights advocates who laid the groundwork for legalizing abortion.

The third film, “The Fragile Promise of Choice,” explores the current move to restrict access through legislation, intimidation of doctors and violence toward providers and clinics.

Abortion was legal and available in the U.S. until roughly the mid 1900s. It was then that the medical profession was solidified and male doctors cornered the market, in effect, outlawing women midwives as quacks and supported in the move by Victorian-era religious authorities. Out went abortion but also a great deal of reproductive care. The role of women working for the rights of women against the power of men in the matter of women’s reproductive health is an undeniable theme that fires the films.

The role of the rarely discussed women who participated in the abortion access underground, for example, is compelling. They risked arrest to vet the doctors who provided secret abortions, provided intense counseling service and even performed thousands of abortions with the tacit blessing of local police.

Indeed, it’s impossible not to see the relationship between abortion rights and women’s liberation. Fadiman’s footage puts 19th-century decision-making men swanning around in top hats and coattails in a continuum with the decision-making men of today so sure they’re doing what’s best for the country by dictating medical and health rules to women. The idea that men would be similarly stripped of their right to make life‑changing decisions based around their bodies is an absurdity that would end in revolt.

Fadiman said that efforts to restrict abortion have created a new version of the class privileges that reigned in the past. Large swaths of the country lack abortion providers. Wealthy women can take the time and have the money to travel to get an abortion. They also have private doctors who will provide safe and discreet after-hours procedures. That’s not the case for poor women, who are now forced by circumstances to have their babies, a recipe that places the privileged class even farther out of reach.

“When I made these films, there was virtually nothing on the topic. I go to college campuses and show them and young women weep because this history has been kept from them. Older women weep, too. ‘I never told anyone’ they say, ‘I went to the back-alley.’ This is all true. This is how it was.”

Excerpt of the films available here.

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The Eagle’s video of the deputy D.A.’s closing argument is powerful as well. The jury agreed wholeheartedly with her arguments.

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Fugit’s opening yesterday:

Walking into Monday morning, I saw a van covered in anti-abortion messages. Missionaries to the Pre-Born Iowa, formed by Army of God member Dan Holman, was parked in front, displaying grotesque images, pretty images, and messages saying abortion causes breast cancer and against vaccination. Inside, David Leach waited for day two of the trial to start. He and two companions talked to some members of the media. I chatted with representatives from the Feminist Majority Foundation and the National Abortion Federation. Outside the courtroom, the conversation was all about abortion. Inside, it was suppose to be about a murder.

First in the morning are two ushers Scott Roeder threatened after he shot Dr. George Tiller. Gary Hoepner stood at the refreshments table with Dr. Tiller, chatting about donuts. He saw Roeder come out of the sanctuary but thought nothing of it as he had seen Roeder the week before. He looked down then saw someone else out of the corner of his eye and looked up to see Roeder shoot. Hoepner followed, trying to keep him from escaping. As they ran across some grass, Roeder told Hoepner to stop following him, that he had a gun.

And Sylvester tweets this morning:

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“I am personally opposed to shooting abortionists,” Coulter says, “but I don’t want to impose my moral values on others.” Over some cross-talk from O’Reilly, she looks at the camera and adds, “Their logic is, if you don’t believe in abortion, don’t have an abortion. If you don’t believe in shooting abortionists, then don’t shoot an abortionist.”

See it to believe it:

Coulter, incidentally, might have shown up at the Independence Institute’s Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms bash in Bennett this past weekend if Sam Wurzelbacher, aka Joe the Plumber, hadn’t already been booked. That’s according to Denver Post gossip columnist Bill Husted, who noted a few weeks back that he “ran into Ann Coulter in Palm Beach last week.” She also told Husted she “loves Jon Caldara,” the president of the Golden-based think tank.

Got a tip? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

(Photo/barjack, Flickr)

You will know, too, of the recent killing, while ushering at his local church, of Dr. George Tiller, one of the few doctors in the country still performing late term abortions. Sadly, this case was proof that fatal violence works. His family has announced that his Wichita, Kansas, clinic will not be reopened.

You may be less familiar with the June 1st shootings in an army recruiting office in Little Rock that killed one soldier and wounded another. The suspect in question is an African-American Muslim convert who says he acted in retaliation for U.S. military activity in the Middle East.

Soon, however, these terrible deeds will be forgotten, as are already the three policemen killed by an assault weapon in Pittsburgh; the four policemen killed in Oakland, California; the 13 people gunned down in Binghamton, New York; the 10 in an Alabama shooting spree; five in Santa Clara, California; the eight dead in a North Carolina, nursing home. All during this year alone.

There is much talk about hate talk; hate crimes against blacks, whites, immigrants, Muslims, Jews; about violence committed in the name of bigotry or religion. But why don’t we talk about guns?

We’re arming ourselves to death. Even as gunshots ricocheted around the country, an amendment allowing concealed weapons in national parks snuck into the popular credit card reform bill. Another victory for the gun lobby, to sounds of silence from the White House.

Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, wrote, just days before the Holocaust Museum incident, that “rather than propose concrete action that makes it harder for dangerous people to get firearms — while still respecting the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding gun owners — all Washington can seem to muster after high-profile shootings are ‘thoughts and prayers’ for the victims and their families.

“For his part, the President has also included sincere expressions of ‘deep sadness’ at these tragic losses — though without any call to change any of our policies to prevent those losses.”

Yet, as a presidential candidate, Obama pledged “our determination to do whatever it takes to eradicate this violence from our streets, from our schools, from our neighborhoods and our cities. That is our duty as Americans.”

The fact is, neither party will stand up to the National Rifle Association, the best known front group for the arms merchants. In Virginia, just across the Potomac River from the Holocaust Museum, this week’s Democratic primary for governor was won by state legislator R. Creigh Deeds, a man who supports allowing concealed weapons in restaurants that serve alcohol and opposes limiting handgun purchases to one a month.

After Wednesday’s shooting, a conservative organization immediately offered those of us in the media a chance to interview the founder of “Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership,” whose expertise, it was said, is in helping people understand why gun control doesn’t belong in a civilized society.

The e-mail went on to say, “Your audience will appreciate [his] non nonsense common sense talk that will make them wonder why anyone wants to ban guns in the first place.”

Thanks, but no thanks. And no thanks to his counterparts among Christians and Muslims who use every violent shedding of blood to try to promote the worship of guns. Guns don’t kill people, they say. People kill people. True. People kill people — with guns.

So let the faithful of every persuasion keep their guns for hunting and skeet, for trap and target practice, for collecting. They can even have a permit for a gun to protect their business or home, even though it’s 22 times more likely to shoot a member of the family (including suicides) than an intruder.

But please, there are already some 200 million, privately owned firearms in America. Every year there are 30,000 gun deaths and in some years more than 400,000 non-fatal, gun-related assaults. The next time someone wades through a pool of blood to sidle up and champion the preservation of firearms, can’t we just say, no thanks?

Enough’s enough.

Bill Moyers is managing editor and Michael Winship is senior writer of the weekly public affairs program Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday night on PBS. Check local airtimes.

(Photo/pdeonarain, Flickr)

Just as federal law specifically penalizes hate crimes, the law also makes it a federal crime to threaten or commit violence against abortion providers, or to vandalize their clinics. Yet as The Washington Independent revealed last week, the criminal law was not being enforced.

The day after Dr. George Tiller was murdered, we obtained data revealing that under the Bush administration, criminal enforcement of the federal law designed to protect abortion providers and clinics had declined by more than 75 percent over the last eight years.

But there’s also a civil component to that federal law, known as the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, or FACE Act. That part of the law allows the attorney general to seek an injunction and compensatory damages for anyone who’s been harmed by any activity that violates the law. And it turns out that the Department of Justice over the last eight years didn’t use that part of the law to protect abortion providers, either.

Under the FACE Act, in addition to criminal charges, the Justice Department can obtain damages and an injunction against anyone who “by force or threat of force or by physical obstruction, intentionally injures, intimidates or interferes with or attempts to injure, intimidate or interfere with” anyone who provides or receives reproductive health services. It also allows the government to prosecute and sue anyone who “intentionally damages or destroys the property” of an abortion clinic, because they are frequently vandalized as part of protesters’ intimidation tactics. The clinic where Dr. Tiller worked, for example, was repeatedly vandalized, including just days before his murder.

Yet despite these broad powers that Congress granted the attorney general in 1994 to prevent and combat violence against abortion clinics and providers, the Bush administration almost never used them. From 2000 until 2008, during the eight years of the Bush administration, the Justice Department filed only one civil case under the FACE Act. From 1994 – 1999, in contrast, in just five years of the Clinton administration, the Department filed 17 civil cases under the FACE Act — in addition to its much heavier load of criminal cases that we’ve reported before.

It’s possible, of course, that the law was so effective in its early years that it deterred all future violations. “I do think that the statute was very effective,” and “for the most part there were fewer complaints coming to us,” said Cathleen Mahoney, vice president and general counsel of the National Abortion Federation and director of the Justice Department’s Task Force on Violence Against Reproductive Health Care Providers until 2006.

But crime statistics provided by the National Abortion Federation show that violence did not stop when the Bush administration came into office. The group reports 3,291 acts of violence against abortion providers in the United States and Canada between 2000 and 2008 — and that’s only the number of incidents they know about. (The total number of incidents in the U.S. alone was not available.) The group warns on its website that “actual incidents are likely much higher.” That number does not include threats, vandalism and harassment, which are also violations of the FACE Act.

The NAF — the organization that most closely tracks such data in the United States — also reports that between 2000 and 2008 there were at least 17 cases of “extreme” violence against abortion providers in the United States, such as arson, stabbing and bomb attacks. At least 607 letters threatening Anthrax contamination (they did not actually contain anthrax) were sent to abortion providers between 2000 and 2002 alone. During the entire eight years of the Bush administration, the federal government prosecuted only 11 individuals for any acts of violence against abortion clinics or providers.

Former Attorney General John Ashcroft, although opposed by many abortion-rights advocates for his vehement opposition to keeping abortion legal, did prosecute the infamous anti-abortion activist and convicted felon Clayton Lee Waagner for the anthrax threats, which attracted significant public attention because they were sent just after lawmakers and news organizations received letters containing anthrax spores, prompting nationwide fears of deadly biological terror attacks.

Waagner was an easy target: a fugitive who’d escaped from jail in February 2001 while awaiting sentencing on federal weapons charges, he was already on the FBI’s Top Ten Most Wanted List, the U.S. Marshals Service Fifteen Most Wanted List, and the Ten Most Wanted List of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. He was arrested in November 2001 and promptly claimed responsibility for over 550 anthrax threat letters sent to abortion providers in October and November. The letters were signed by the Army of God, an extremist anti-abortion group that openly advocates violence against specific physicians who provide abortions. Waagner’s supporters in the Army of God, however, were not prosecuted or even sued for civil damages or injunctions under the FACE Act, although the group was responsible for distributing a manual that supplies detailed instructions for attacking abortion clinics, manufacturing bombs and cutting off the hands of abortion doctors, according to SourceWatch. The FBI has characterized the prosecution of Waagner as a “counterterrorism case,” suggesting that the “Army of God” is considered a domestic terrorist organization by federal law enforcement.

Yet despite the prosecution of Waagner in 2001, the Army of God today continues to do much the same thing. The group and its members continue to support and advocate the murder of abortion providers. Its Website, for example, on Wednesday celebrated the Tiller murder in this banner headline:

“The lives of innocent babies scheduled to be murdered by George Tiller are spared by the action of American hero Scott Roeder. George Tiller the Babykiller reaped what he sowed and is now in eternal hell.”

It commends previous convicted murderers of abortion doctors as “heroes,” and continues to host the “Nuremberg Files,” a notorious list of the names of abortion providers and recipients, with a line through those that have been killed and names grayed of those who have been murdered. (The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2002 found that these constituted threats to the doctors.)

As Rachel Maddow recently described the Army of God’s current Website on MSNBC:

“You can actually scroll through pages and pages of mug shots and descriptions of bombings and shootings and murders and attempted murders — all praising the perpetrators, and even suggesting ways to get away with the same types of crimes that these people committed but you could do it without getting caught.”

Although such conduct has in the past led to violence, the threats are often not prosecuted by local police. According to Dr. Susan Robinson, who used to perform abortions at the same Wichita clinic as Dr. Tiller did before it was closed: “they allow the anti-abortion protesters to set up dozens of crosses and leave them all day. Dr. Tiller went to the city attorney over the crosses, and complained that people block the clinic driveway,” she told journalist Amy Goodman. “He told me that the city attorney said, ‘I would rather be sued by George Tiller than the anti-abortion folks.’”

The federal law was enacted in part to fill in the gaps when local authorities refused or lacked the resources to bring charges. “Often local police won’t enforce the local laws against trespassing,” explained Mahoney, the former federal prosecutor. “It’s politically charged and local police want to stay out of it.” During her tenure at the Department of Justice, Mahoney said it was the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department that was charged with enforcing the FACE Act. That’s the same division that Inspector General reports and Congressional hearings eventually revealed repeatedly made hiring and enforcement decisions based on conservative political ideology rather than merit.

In the one situation in the last eight years that the Bush Justice Department decided did merit a lawsuit, in 2007, the charges were so serious that it’s not clear why the administration filed a civil suit rather than criminal charges. The federal government sought only an injunction — essentially, a court order telling the defendant to stop.

Yet this was no mere schoolyard-style harassment. According to the legal complaint filed by the Justice Department, John Dunkle, another member of the “Army of God”, had been publishing a monthly Web newsletter “encouraging readers of his publications to use deadly force against specifically identified reproductive health clinic physicians and staff, providing instruction on how to employ deadly force tactics; provoking physical and verbal confrontations with reproductive health clinic physicians, staff and patients at various clinics” and “publishing internet postings containing photographs and the home addresses of reproductive health clinic physicians and staff,” among other things.

The government also claimed that he “threatened a specific female clinic physician until she ceased providing reproductive health services in fear of the Defendants’ threats to her life.”

Those threats included “explicitly encourag[ing] his readers to kill the targeted individual by shooting her in the head”; publishing her name, photo and home address on his Web page and blog; and publishing instructions “regarding the specific means to kill the targeted individual, as well as how to escape detection upon the commission of her murder.” Such postings dated back more than two years, identifying the same person.

There is no question that such threats are criminal under the federal law, say legal experts. “Physical obstruction is not protected, violence is not protected and true threats are not protected,” said Louise Melling, Director of the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project, which has submitted several amicus briefs to courts defending the constitutionality of the federal law. A “true threat” has been defined by the courts has a threat that would reasonably be interpreted by the person hearing it as a serious threat to their safety.

Yet in the case of John Dunkle, whose threats caused a reproductive health provider to quit her profession, the government did not seek criminal penalties or even any monetary damages to compensate the victims and deter future crimes; it simply asked the court to tell him to stop.

Department of Justice spokesman Alejandro Miyar said that department officials decide whether or not to prosecute or seek damages in cases “on a case-by-case basis, and a number of factors are taken into account, including — among others — whether there is an identifiable subject and whether the matter is being pursued by local officials.” He was not aware of whether Dunkle had been prosecuted for related acts under state law, and there was no indication in the documents filed in the federal case that he had been.

Threats against abortion providers appears to have had a serious impact on the availability of the procedure, and particularly on the ability of women to obtain legal later-term abortions, even when the pregnancy threatens the woman’s life. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit organization focused on sexual and reproductive health research, only two percent of all abortion providers in the United States currently provide such procedures, which are most heavily targeted by extremist anti-abortion groups. Women most commonly seek such abortions due to abnormalities of the fetus and threats to a woman’s health or life, and in many states they’re only legal if the woman’s health or life is in danger. Dr. Tiller and his clinic were therefore frequent targets of both violent threats and actions, up until the day before his death.

The FACE Act was adopted to prevent and prosecute this sort of violence, in part because Congress concluded that existing state laws and local law enforcement were unable to do the job on their own.

When President Clinton signed the FACE Act in 1994, he said: “We simply cannot — we must not — continue to allow the attacks, the incidents of arson, the campaigns of intimidation upon law-abiding citizens that (have) given rise to this law,” citing the murder of Dr. David Gunn in Florida in 1993, and the shooting of Dr. Tiller in both arms outside his clinic in Wichita that same year.

“No person seeking medical care, no physician providing that care should have to endure harassments or threats or obstruction or intimidation or even murder from vigilantes who take the law into their own hands because they think they know what the law ought to be.”

The statistics on enforcement of the FACE Act by the Justice Department suggest that during the Bush administration, protecting those physicians was no longer a high priority.

Antiabortion protesters led in prayer. (Photo/Matthew Bradley, Flickr)

“How tragic, how tragic,” Boulder physician Warren Hern told The Associated Press after Tiller’s family made the announcement Tuesday. ” “This is what they want, they’ve been wanting this for 35 years,” Hern said, referring to anti-abortion activists he earlier termed part of a “fascist movement.”

Asked whether he felt efforts should be made to keep the clinic open, [Hern] said: “This was Dr. Tiller’s clinic. How much can you resist this kind of violence? What doctor, what reasonable doctor would work there? Where does it stop?”

Hern said he began receiving death threats when he opened his first outpatient abortion clinic in 1973, which has prompted him to take security measures that includes “working behind four layers of bullet proof glass.”

“I will never be safe the rest of my life,” Hern said. “No matter what I do. Even if I close my office. They’ve told me, don’t bother wearing a bulletproof vest, we’re going to go for a head shot.”

Hern, who runs the Boulder Abortion Clinic, has been under increased protection from federal marshals since Tiller was shot to death at a Wichita church last Sunday. Attorney General Eric Holder ordered agents to step up security for clinics and doctors who provide abortions in the wake of Tiller’s murder.

“The anti-abortion fanatics have to shut up and go home,” Hern told the AP. “They have to back off and they have to respect other people’s point of view. This is an outrage, this is a national outrage.”

Attorneys for the Tiller family issued a statement Tuesday saying the Wichita clinic, Women’s Health Care Services, which has been shuttered since Tiller was shot to death, will remain permanently closed.

“We are proud of the service and courage shown by our husband and father and know that women’s health care needs have been met because of his dedication and service,” the Tiller family said in the statement. They said they will honor the abortion provider’s memory with private charitable activities.

The clinic’s closure leaves the nearest abortion provider three hours away for Wichita women, The Wichita Eagle’s Dion Lefler reports. That makes Wichita “more typical” of medium-sized cities in the Midwest, Lefler writes, noting that 96 percent of Kansas’ counties already lacked an abortion provider before the Wichita clinic shut its doors.

“A three-hour trip time is not unusual for many women in America, especially if you look at places like Mississippi and Arkansas, where substantial populations don’t have an abortion provider,” said Jenny O’Donnell of the Abortion Access Project.

The man accused of killing Tiller told CNN that the clinic’s closure was “a victory for all the unborn children.” Scott Roeder, 51, wouldn’t admit to shooting Tiller in a jailhouse interview with CNN’s Ted Rowlands, but said if he winds up being convicted in the slaying, “the entire motive was the defense of the unborn.”

[Roeder] said the closure would mean “no more slicing and dicing of the unborn child in the mother’s womb and no more needles of poison into the baby’s heart to stop the heart from beating, and no more partial-birth abortions.”

One of the few leaders of the anti-abortion movement who has hedged his condemnation of Tiller’s assassination told the AP he was glad the clinic would remain closed.

Randall Terry, who founded the original Operation Rescue anti-abortion group, responded to the news by saying, “Good riddance.” He said Tiller’s clinic would go down in history the way people remember Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps.

(Photo/Jason Kosena)

Colorado physician Warren Hern, who has run the Boulder Abortion Clinic since 1975 and was a friend of Tiller’s, told National Public Radio he wants Obama to draw the line on anti-abortion violence in a national address and to declare to abortion foes, “We will stop you.”

“I think the president of the United States needs to go to a national television broadcast and say to the American public, ‘Safe abortion is a fundamental component of women’s health care. Anti-abortion terrorism and violence will not be tolerated. We will stop you,’” Hern told NPR reporter Kathy Lohr.

Listen to the NPR story “Abortion Providers on High Alert.”

On Sunday, Obama issued a statement condemning Tiller’s murder:

I am shocked and outraged by the murder of Dr. George Tiller as he attended church services this morning. However profound our differences as Americans over difficult issues such as abortion, they cannot be resolved by heinous acts of violence.

Also Sunday, Attorney General Eric Holder ordered federal agents to step up security for physicians and clinics around the country and to “take appropriate steps to help prevent any related acts of violence from occurring.”

Hern, who has been under increased protection by U.S. marshals since Tiller’s assassination, is one of only a handful of late-term abortion providers to advertise his services. Hern has been operating his clinic for decades under threat of violence, though he hasn’t attracted the attention of the anti-abortion movement the way Tiller did.

Tiller’s murder is the “absolutely inevitable consequence” of decades of anti-abortion fanaticism, Hern told The Colorado Independent.

“The anti-abortion movement message is, ‘Do what we tell you to do or we will kill you,’ and they do,” Hern added. “This is a fascist movement.”

Center for Reproductive Rights President Nancy Northrup echoed Hern’s call for a strong public stand against anti-abortion violence.

“We need to hear from our officeholders, from doctors, from religious leaders, from the community,” Northup told NPR. “[W]e can’t stop the voices of those who will continue to vilify and demonize, but what we can do is we need to have more voices standing up for these doctors.”

Northrup also called on the federal government to restart a Justice Department task force that battled anti-abortion violence during the Clinton administration. The group plans to release a report later this week showing harassment against abortion providers is on the rise in six states studied, Northrup told NPR.

It’s a trend noted earlier this week by Cristina Page in a Huffington Post story. During the Clinton years, America saw a “five-fold increase in violence against abortion providers,” which ebbed markedly after the avowedly anti-abortion President George W. Bush took office, Page found. But with the pro-choice Obama in office, the trend has moved the other direction.

During the Clinton era, between 1994-2000 there were 6 abortion providers and clinic staff murdered, and 17 attempted murders of abortion providers. There were 12 bombings or arsons during the Clinton years.

During the Bush administration, not only were there no murders, there were no attempted murders. There was one clinic bombing during the Bush years. [...]

In the last year of the Bush administration there were 396 harassing calls to abortion clinics. In just the first four months of the Obama administration that number has jumped to 1401.

(Photo/SMN, Flickr)

Then later that year, ACLA unveiled a second poster, this time targeting Dr. Robert Crist, an abortion provider in Kansas City. The poster listed his home and work addresses and featured his photograph. It offered $500 to “any ACLA organization that successfully persuades Crist to turn from his child killing through activities within ACLA guidelines,” which prohibited violence.

The following January, ACLA created the “Nuremberg Files” — a series of dossiers it had compiled on doctors, clinic employees, politicians, judges and other abortion rights supporters. Dr. George Tiller of Wichita, Kans., who was killed Sunday, was among them. They would be prosecuted, ACLA wrote, “once the tide of this nation’s opinion turns against the wanton slaughter of God’s children.” ACLA sent copies of the dossiers to an anti-abortion activist who posted the information on a website. There, the names of those who had been attacked by “anti-abortion terrorists” — as the court called them — were listed, with a strike through the names of those who had been murdered. The names of those wounded were grayed.

Although neither the posters nor the Website contained explicit threats against the doctors, similar posters had previously been made of other doctors shortly before they were violently attacked; one was murdered. Abortion providers soon took to wearing bulletproof vests, drew the curtains of their home windows and received protection from U.S. Marshals. The strategy had worked.

Eventually, some of the doctors, represented by Planned Parenthood, sued ACLA, twelve activists and an affiliated organization, claiming that their actions violated the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, or FACE act, among other laws. At trial, a jury found that the statements were “true threats” and therefore not protected by the First Amendment. The doctors won $107 million in damages and an injunction barring the anti-abortion activists from distributing similar information in the future.

Although the anti-abortion protesters appealed, a majority of judges on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the verdict. Such “WANTED”- style posters, the court ruled, in the context of previous similar threats and subsequent violence, and the lines drawn through the names of doctors who’d been murdered, were not protected by the First Amendment: “ACLA’s conduct amounted to a true threat and is not protected speech.” The Supreme Court declined to review the case, and it remains good law.

Much of the discussion in the wake of Tiller’s slaying has been about criminal prosecution of those who murder abortion doctors. But there’s a growing concern about the anti-abortion extremists — some call them domestic terrorists — who enable and encourage such murders by labeling abortion providers “mass murderers”, Nazis and worse, and implying that violent attacks against them are not only justified, but honorable.

As Rachel Maddow revealed in chilling detail in her MSNBC news show on Monday night, groups such as Rescue America, Prayer and Action News, Army of God and Operation Rescue Founder Randall Terry all appeared to be celebrating Tiller’s murder on Monday. And while extremists who promote violence against abortion providers could be prosecuted under state and federal law — and particularly under the federal Freedom to Access Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act — the federal government in recent years has hardly prosecuted any such cases.

According to statistics provided by the Department of Justice, the Bush administration brought only about two criminal prosecutions per year in the entire country under the FACE Act , and never more than four in any single year. The Clinton administration, in contrast, prosecuted 17 defendants for violations of the FACE Act in 1997 alone, and an average of about 10 per year since the law was enacted in 1994. Those cases included one against a woman in 1996 who yelled through a bullhorn to a doctor, “Robert, remember Dr. Gunn. This could happen to you …”, referring to Dr. David Gunn, the first abortion doctor ever murdered, in 1993. In another case, a man who parked a Ryder truck outside a clinic shortly after the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City, where a Ryder truck had been used to carry explosives, was found to have threatened force. Stalking, arson and bomb threats are also illegal.

Whether the dropoff in prosecutions is because the FACE Act successfully deterred crimes after its enactment or because the Bush administration wasn’t interested in prosecuting them is not clear. “The amount of activity really did drop a lot after FACE was enacted and it was beginning to be enforced,” said Cathleen Mahoney, Executive Vice President of the National Abortion Federation who was an attorney in the Justice Department until 2006. “Certainly the political will wasn’t there.”

That’s disappointed Janet Crepps, deputy director of the legal program at the Center for Reproductive Rights. “I don’t think that the government has done enough,” she said, noting that while the Clinton administration had created a task force in the Department of Justice to coordinate responses to clinic threats and violence, during the Bush years, “we’ve heard that providers during that time would call DOJ for help and get no response.”

Justice Department spokesman Alejandro Miyar said Tuesday that the task force still exists, and in a statement released after the fatal shooting of Dr. Tiller, Attorney General Eric Holder said that “[f]ederal law enforcement is coordinating with local law enforcement officials in Kansas on the investigation of this crime.” It remains to be seen, however, whether the government will also investigate the anti-abortion activists who threaten abortion providers and may have worked with the actual murderer.

But as the Planned Parenthood case illustrates, the doctors and clinic workers who are targets of violent threats don’t have to wait for the government to act. The FACE act allows doctors or clinic workers to privately sue the individuals and groups making the threat. And although that’s been challenged on First Amendment grounds, its use has been upheld by the courts in cases where the intent to threaten or intimidate was clear.

The lawyer who represented Planned Parenthood in that case declined to be interviewed for this article, citing the sensitivity surrounding the issues, lack of knowledge of the circumstances of Dr. Tiller’s death and respect for his family. But several lawyers confirmed that the case, last litigated in 2006 when the anti-abortion groups tried to appeal to the Supreme Court, could serve as a model for others.

“It’s very fact-intensive,” said Mahoney, from the National Abortion Foundation. “It really depends on the particular circumstances. We would say that people should not be allowed to threaten anyone for providing legal medical services.” In addition to a private right to sue, state attorneys general can also enforce the law within their states.

Some civil libertarians, however, have concerns. On “The Rachel Maddow Show” Monday, George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley cautioned against prosecution or lawsuits against even those who promote violence. “We have this difficult line to walk between free speech and preventative law enforcement,” he said. “The Supreme Court has said that violent speech is protected … and it is in fact protected to say all abortion doctors should be killed.”

That’s not necessarily true under the FACE Act, however. The law specifically targets whoever “by force or threat of force … intentionally injures, intimidates or interferes with …” anyone who is a provider of abortion services or a patient trying to access them.

That’s not to say that FACE is sufficient or its enforcement is easy. “It’s penalties are significantly lower than many other federal criminal statutes,” said Mahoney, who was involved in criminal prosecutions under FACE in the justice department. The other difficulty, she acknowledged, is the “delicate balance” between protected speech and incitement to violence. While the law does make it a crime to “intimidate or interfere” with provision of abortion services, “there’s a lot of law about what’s a criminally actionable threat” that makes intimidating statements difficult to prosecute. “It’s not so much FACE as that whole body of law that’s the difficulty,” said Mahoney.

Avoiding such politically charged difficulties may be why the federal government appears in recent years to have avoided enforcing the law altogether. The murder of George Tiller, apparently by a known anti-abortion zealot, may begin to change the political equation.

Religion and politics writer Frederick Clarkson warns at Women’s eNews.com not to fall prey to the “lone nut” theory that propelled Scott Roeder to murder Dr. Tiller.

Anniversaries are important to those engaged in long-term revolutionary struggles including those on the American far right.

Tim McVeigh, for example, blew up the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995 on the anniversary of the federal assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas.

It may be no coincidence that Tiller’s assassination occurred on the sixth anniversary of the capture of Eric Rudolph who was convicted of pipe bombings the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, a gay bar, and two abortion clinics.

Rudolph’s bombing of the clinic in Birmingham, Ala., resulted in the death of an off duty police officer and the horrible maiming of a nurse. (The pipe bombs were packed with nails which functioned as shrapnel.)

Antiabortion domestic terrorism, including murders, bombings, arsons and threats, are linked to the radical militia movement that simultaneously promotes “Biblical justice” rationales for murdering abortion providers while celebrating those responsible for the violent clashes as “heroes of the faith.”

Rudolph, who is incarcerated under five life sentences in the Florence Supermax facility in southern Colorado, was tied to the Army of God, an ultra-conservative, militia-inspired Christian Identity group.

Both radical and mainstream Christian antiabortion activists tend to frame their cause as a battle against a modern-day Holocaust borrowing heavily on allusion to death camps, innocent victims and an underground resistance movement.

That genocidal context also offers special significance to the abortion-is-genocide adherents — May 31, 1962 is the date the notorious “architect of the Holocaust” Nazi SS officer Adolph Eichmann was hanged in Israel for war crimes.

News reports profiling Tiller’s accused murderer Scott Roeder point to him espousing extremist militia and Christian Identity beliefs and Nazi-tinged rantings on antiabortion Web sites:

In recent years, someone using the name Scott Roeder has posted anti-Tiller comments on various Internet sites. One post, dated Sept. 3, 2007, and placed on a site called chargetiller.com, said that Tiller needed to be “stopped.”

“It seems as though what is happening in Kansas could be compared to the ‘lawlessness’ which is spoken of in the Bible,” it said. “Tiller is the concentration camp ‘Mengele’ of our day and needs to be stopped before he and those who protect him bring judgment upon our nation.”