Keep justice blind: Civil disobedience is an American right, regardless of party

In September 2025, the Trump administration filed a civil Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (or FACE Act) case against pro-Palestinian demonstrators outside a New Jersey synagogue. And in February of this year, federal prosecutors charged 39 people, including journalist Don Lemon, for storming into a church to disrupt a service.

At its core, the FACE Act is a federal weapon that can be aimed at almost any protest, by almost any administration, against almost anyone. 

The U.S. Senate passed the FACE Act in 1994 with a predominantly Democratic vote of 69-30, ostensibly with the main intention of protecting medical access to abortion. It required a sustained lobbying effort to bring federal power against pro-lifers. To secure bipartisan votes, its drafters extended protection to pregnancy resource centers and places of worship. The neutrality, it turned out, was only on paper. It has become a weapon to mainly silence civil disobedience on the right.

One of us, Carol Crossed, knows what civil disobedience looked like before this law existed. So do the thousands of other followers of the nonviolent civil disobedience of Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Carol has been arrested 19 times — at nuclear facilities, for civil rights, in opposition to policies affecting Central American Indigenous populations, and for other causes. Seven of those arrests were at abortion facilities. In all of these cases, protesters represented the vulnerable whose lives were threatened by injustice.

Carol also helped raise funds........

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