A group of anti-Choice extremists have come to Washington, DC to protest at the site of a future Planned Parenthood office, but because they are barred from the Planned Parenthood site, they've set up camp at a nearby charter school, with gory banners and scary chants, and they've devoted themselves to terrorizing the school's pre-K to fifth graders in a bid to get the school to join them in campaigning against Planned Parenthood.
It's a bizarre campaign, even for the anti-Choice religious right, but then, the out-of-towners camping out at the Two Rivers Charter School is a bizarre lot, including in their number Robert Weiler Jr, "an unrepentant domestic terrorist" who was sentenced to five years after being caught planning to shoot and bomb a Maryland abortion clinic — police seized his pipe-bomb (his blog is called "Contraception is Murder").
The school has tried to minimize the impact of the protesters on their small children, allowing kids to enter the building through a side-entrance in an alleyway, and the extremists followed them there, shouting at them and shoving their photoshopped gore-signs in the faces of very small children. Some of the protesters have hired Liberty Counsel, the lawyers who represented Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis, to argue for their legal right to attack the school as a proxy for the future Planned Parenthood building.
Weiler has stood outside Two Rivers to protest at least twice, school officials claim. Once he held a giant sign that read: "Two Rivers Hates Free Speech."
Most of his co-defendants in the injunction have tried to distance themselves from Weiler, but a quick social media search shows that a few are at least Facebook friends and have had contact prior to the beginning of the Two Rivers protests.
Currently only two of the protesters have lawyered up: Larry Cirignano and Ruby Nicdao. Cirignano is the Virginia state director of American Catholics for Religious Freedom and the holder of the "Not 4 Sale" sign at the school. He's being represented by
Liberty Counsel. You may have heard of Liberty Counsel, as they also represent Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
Liberty Counsel has stated that they believe there are no valid claims against their client, but are shocked that the school would "allow the horrors of the abortion practice" nearby.
Inside the Bizarre War Anti-Abortion Zealots Are Waging Against School Kids
[Matt Ramos/Broadly]
(via Skepchick)
