The successful suit against two anti-abortion groups concluded April 20 in Chicago threatens the civil liberties of everyone dedicated to peaceful protest. However one may feel about abortion or the politics and tactics of the groups in question, the use of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) against anti-abortion protesters sets a dangerous precedent by using a statute designed to fight organized crime against a political movement.

Indeed, Univ. of Notre Dame law professor G. Robert Blakely, who originally drafted the law, denounced the verdict, saying that it had never been intended for such use and that in doing so, it was "intended to scare the hell out of all demonstrators."

Operation Rescue and Pro-Life Action League have engaged in acts of nonviolent civil disobedience outside abortion clinics in cities across the country, at times disrupting the clinics' normal operations. Such tactics have created controversy, not just among supporters of legal access to abortion, but among many abortion opponents who prefer working through legal channels and believe that such confrontational tactics hurt their cause.

Defenders of such tactics believe that they are necessary to bring public attention to the issue, to actually prevent (however briefly) abortions from taking place at the targeted clinic, and to provide a vehicle for abortion opponents to participate in a form of nonviolent witness.

Until Congress passed the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE) in 1994, which made it a felony to engage in such nonviolent action, more than 60,000 people were arrested in such protests. This total is more than those arrested in the civil rights, farm workers, environmental, and anti-war movements combined.

The National Organization for Women--representing scores of individuals and clinics subjected to nonviolent protests, threats, harassment, and violent attacks--decided to take the unprecedented action of utilizing RICO to destroy these organizations and put a damper on any possible protests in the future. To do so, they have attempted to prove that these groups are responsible for the scattered acts of violence against clinics and their employees.

The threat of such violence is very real and very disturbing. Yet both groups being sued are on record as supporting exclusively nonviolent methods.

The efforts to link these groups, which have largely maintained a disciplined nonviolence in their protests and acts of civil disobedience, to those who have bombed clinics and murdered their staff, is patently disingenuous. It is no different than the segregationists who tried to blame Martin Luther King's campaign of passive resistance in the civil rights struggle for the riots in urban ghettos or the militarists who sought to link the overwhelmingly peaceful movement against the Vietnam War to scattered acts of violence by radical groups.

Having interviewed Operation Rescue's founder Randall Terry several years ago, I can vouch that he is indeed a political reactionary and a dangerous demagogue. However, participants in the group's nonviolent campaigns have generally been those who act not out of some right-wing political agenda, but out of a deep moral calling to make an active witness against what they consider to be an act of violence. Many of the participants in these sit-ins are from the Catholic Left and are veterans of civil disobedience campaigns for a variety of peace and social justice issues.

Whether one agrees with them or not, they are part of an American tradition of nonviolent civil disobedience and are as sincere in their quest as those who oppose nuclear weapons, arms shipments to dictators, racial segregation, nuclear power, investments in South Africa's apartheid system or any other injustice in risking arrest as an act of conscience.

As a result of this verdict, groups ranging from ACT-UP to Earth First! to Greenpeace to labor unions could be convicted of racketeering for conspiring to engage in everything from peaceful sit-ins to setting up picket lines. A powerful vehicle of popular participation would be compromised. With citizens no longer able to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience against what they consider to be unjust laws and immoral policies, political power would be concentrated still further in the hands of office holders, judges and the wealthy. The tradition of nonviolent action, which has brought great vitality and progressive change to the American political landscape, could be lost forever.