EDITORIAL – Protest limits exist for a reason

Mary Kathryn Brown does a lot of protesting, according to yesterday’s Post-Gazette. It’s her… Mary Kathryn Brown does a lot of protesting, according to yesterday’s Post-Gazette. It’s her right as an American citizen, and no one has interfered with it. No one has tried to keep her from distributing leaflets or talking to people on the sidewalks, whether she is protesting abortion or pornography.

However, three months ago the city of Pittsburgh regulated where and how Brown and other protesters can share their opinions. Because anti-abortion protesters have interfered with patients at Allegheny Reproductive Health Center, a private clinic that performs abortions in East Liberty, the city created a set of rules designed to keep protests at abortion clinics more controlled.

Before, a police officer was stationed near the clinic to maintain a general sense of order. Now, a 100-foot buffer zone exists around each clinic. Within those 100 feet, anyone – patient, protester or passerby – has the right to personal space. If a protester approaches a patient, the patient can ask him to step away and must be given eight feet of space. If a worker from the clinic approaches a protester, the protester has the same rights. Protesters also must stay at least 15 feet away from the building at all times, which prevents them from attempting to physically block patients’ access to the clinic.

Brown’s lawsuit, filed by a Christian advocacy group, alleges that these regulations are enforced only against anti-abortion protesters, and that this constitutes “viewpoint discrimination.” How does Brown know she was discriminated against? Simple. She had distributed anti-pornography literature in the same area and had not been cited for violating any personal-space rules. When she tried to do the same with anti-abortion leaflets, she was cited.

There are a lot of things that have to happen before a person gets cited for anything under this ordinance. Someone must request that the person move away and the person must deny the request. The police must be called, and it can take as many as 20 minutes for them to arrive. Then, the police must see the person violating the ordinance. It’s very possible that when Brown went on an anti-pornography crusade, one or more of these steps did not happen.

What’s more, it’s self-evident that people would be more upset by an anti-abortion protest than an anti-pornography one if they are en route to an abortion clinic. Why wasn’t Brown protesting sins of the flesh outside of a porn shop? She would likely have met with minimal interference had she protested abortions outside of a porn shop; it isn’t surprising that she had little resistance to the inverse.

This ordinance was put in place to keep protesters from intimidating, coercing and confronting people going into clinics, not to discriminate against anybody’s views. If protesters have a problem with the ordinance, maybe they need to think about changing their tactics.