Lemon’s live feed could provide useful evidence for federal authorities, who said Monday the protest is being investigated as a potential violation of the FACE Act, which makes it a crime to threaten or intimidate people at houses of worship or patients at abortion clinics.
“I’m looking at a young man in the corner. He’s frightened. He’s crying. He’s scared,” Lemon narrated from inside the church.
But Ellison insisted Monday that the FACE Act does not apply to the church operation, saying it usually applies to anti-abortion protests outside abortion clinics.
“The FACE Act is designed to protect the rights of people seeking their reproductive rights to be protected and so that people for a religious reason cannot just use religion to break into women’s reproductive health centers,” Ellison told Lemon.
But Ellison’s own record contradicts that claim. As Minnesota attorney general, he submitted a brief in a 2020 federal lawsuit that accused a Minneapolis woman of violating the First Amendment rights of parishioners at Dar Al-Farooq, a mosque outside Minneapolis, by filming them without their permission.
In 2015, as a House member, Ellison urged Obama civil rights chief Vanita Gupta to investigate whether a group of protesters in Phoenix violated the FACE Act by holding firearms during protests outside a Phoenix mosque.
Why, I’m beginning to believe that Keith Ellison has his thumb firmly on the lefthand scale when it comes to applying the law:
