Comments Elsewhere

Interesting post.

I don’t have much of anything to add by way of commentary, but there is another case that I’d like to mention: the “Nuremberg Files,” run by Neal Horsley, which collected names, home addresses, and personal information on abortion providers and those who (according to Horsley’s ill-defined criteria) were complicit in abortion. The modus operandi was basically the same as the SHAC website; the putative purpose was to collect dossiers for a future trial for crimes against humanity against abortion providers (after the Christian Reconstructionist revolution, or whatever). The information may have been used by James Charles Kopp to murder Dr. Barnett Slepian in Buffalo and by other antiabortion terrorists in two or three other attacks. A lot of factors about the way the site was written and run led it to become an issue in Planned Parenthood vs. ACLA, with Planned Parenthood arguing that it amounted to an overt threat. The case has been kicked around back and forth in the court system; PP won the case before the full 9th circuit court of appeals but it may go before the Supreme Court yet. (Horsley, for his part, has been having trouble with finding Internet Service Providers to host his page; at the URI where the page used to be he now complains that it “has been shut down by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and every Internet Service Provider in the USA,” and that “It is strictly against the policy of the United States of America to frighten the people tasked with eliminating unwanted Americans” (which I can’t say is very reassuring as to his intentions in having put the site up in the first place).

In any case, does Horsley’s site count as incitement? An actionable threat? I don’t know; I don’t think the answer is obvious either way. (I used to think it obviously did, but I’m not so sure anymore.) But it does seem likely that unless there are some important differences of detail, the answer will have to stand or fall along with the answer to the SHAC case.