Bad Buffer Zones

Rachel Maddow is right about buffer zones, whose imposition around abortionists the Supreme Court recently struck down nine to nothing, but not in the way she intends, Alasdair Riggs writes in Spiked!. Since the Supreme Court has one abortionists should have one, she argues. Riggs asks “How about – in perhaps the only country that still takes freedom of speech seriously – allowing everyone to protest wherever they like?”

And then:

The word of the day is ‘safety’, which is increasingly conflated with ‘comfort’. One rather typical critic of the Supreme Court’s ruling, writing in the Chicago Tribune, laments the loss of a law ‘meant to protect women from extreme confrontation with abortion opponents’. Placing the word ‘extreme’ before the word ‘confrontation’ does not make this any less a question of free discourse as opposed to violence. The history of violent episodes outside abortion clinics has no bearing on this discussion. If a person is willing to break the law, and, say, murder an abortion doctor, why would he or she be held back by a buffer zone? Sneaking the word ‘safety’ into this discussion, and attempting to smear all pro-lifers with an air of mob violence, is disingenuous and cowardly.