NARAL Double-Speak

NARAL Pro-Choice America has sponsored a television advertisement that will begin airing in Maine and Rhode Island tomorrow which focuses on Associate Justice-nominee John Roberts’ role in Bray v. Alexandria Women's Health Clinic. The Bray case focused on whether the 19th-century anti-Ku Klux Klan statute could be used in modern times to prevent blockades of health clinics by abortion protesters.

Roberts, then-Deputy Solicitor General of the United States, filed a friend-of-the-court brief that sided with the clinic protesters' reading of the Klan Act. And the U.S. Supreme Court, by a vote of 6 to 3, agreed with Roberts.

The NARAL commercial, features Emily Lyons, a clinic director who was badly injured when a bomb exploded at her clinic in Birmingham in 1998. The ad concludes by saying, “America can't afford a justice whose ideology leads him to excuse violence against other Americans….”

When the proverbial fit hit the shan today, however, NARAL President Nancy Keenan defended the claims but said, “We're not suggesting that Mr. Roberts condones clinic violence.”

Let's try that again, but in slow motion: NARAL claims that Roberts' “ideology leads him to excuse violence against other Americans,” but they are “not suggesting that Mr. Roberts condones clinic violence.”

Apparently, this is another occasion in which it depends on what one's definition of “is,” is....