Yesterday a gratuitous 10-year waste of the court's time and taxpayers' money culminated in the BC Court of Appeals ruling that the 50-metre "bubble zones" around womens' clinics do not violate the free speech rights of the anti-abortion protesters that infest the surrounding areas:"A Canadian appeals court on Thursday upheld a provincial "bubble zone" law that limited protests around abortion clinics in British Columbia.The three-judge panel rejected the claims of anti-abortion activists and civil libertarians that the law violated rights of free expression by stopping protesters from talking to women entering the clinics." [...]
"Two western Canadian anti-abortion activists, Donald Spratt and Gordon Watson, violated the law in 1998 outside the Everywoman's Health Clinic in an effort to have the law struck down by the courts.
The men argued unsuccessfully that protection zone was too large and that even if it had been needed at the time it was enacted it was no longer necessary because the tone of anti-abortion protests had changed."
How totally vomitous. These two guys want to get closer to the clinic so they can bully and berate the patients... and who-knows-what else? Take pictures of staff? Record license plate numbers? Leave a bomb? These people are bugfuck nuts and they've proven time and again that they can't be trusted, that's why there are bubble zones to keep them at bay. But the contention that the bubble zone law violates freedom of speech because, waaaahhh! protesters can't get close enough to really harrass the patients, is ludicrous. By that logic, stalking laws must also violate free speech.
Nobody's telling these cretins they can't say whatever they want to say -- they just can't say it that close to the clinic. They're free to jabber and foam all they want at a distance of 50 metres.
Bubble zones exist to protect the patients. This year, fetus fetishists have made a big show about how their dear departed Bill C-484 "protects pregnant women" (which it doesn't, but that's another story) -- obviously, in their view, some women are more deserving of protection than others.
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