The Stories We Tell by Linda Greenhouse
Last month, the court heard arguments in an abortion-related case from Massachusetts. The question was whether the 35-foot buffer zone that the state maintains around medical offices where abortions are performed violates the First Amendment. The case is McCullen v. Coakley. Coakley is Martha Coakley, the Massachusetts attorney general, whose office is defending the 2007 law. McCullen, in whose name the challenge to the law was brought, is Eleanor McCullen, and the story many people seem to be telling themselves about this case is hers.
Eleanor McCullen is a 77-year-old grandmother whose photograph, with an oversize cross hanging from her neck over a bulky winter coat, has been ubiquitous in accounts of the case. For many years she has positioned herself outside the entrance to a Planned Parenthood clinic in downtown Boston with the mission of dissuading women from going ahead with their scheduled abortions. Her argument in the case is that the buffer zone means she can’t engage the women in low-key conversation as she wishes, but instead has to raise her voice in order to get their attention and deliver a message that as a result is inevitably perceived differently. . .
Justice Antonin Scalia, for one, channeled Mrs. McCullen from the bench during the Jan. 15 argument, when he instructed Jennifer Grace Miller, the state’s lawyer, that “what this case involves, what these people want to do, is to speak quietly and in a friendly manner.” Returning to this theme later in the argument, he scolded Ms. Miller: “I object to you calling these people protestors, which you’ve been doing here during the whole presentation. That is not how they present themselves. They do not say they want to make protests. They say they want to talk quietly to the women who are going into these facilities. Now how does that make them protestors?”
Missing from the story of the cherubic grandmother, of course, is context -- the reason that Massachusetts enacted its buffer zone, adapted from one the Supreme Court upheld in a Colorado case 14 years ago. (The vote in that case, Hill v. Colorado, was 6 to 3, but the departure since then of two members of the majority, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, could make a crucial difference, leaving the durability of the precedent is very much in doubt.)
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/06/opinion/greenhouse-the-stories-we-tell.html?hp&rref=opinion
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