Steven Ertelt, LifeNews.com

Obama's public enemy #1.

The Obama administration is coming under fire today from a pro-life legal group accusing it of targeting peaceful pro-lifers under a federal law meant to target people who engage in abortion-related violence.

A recent Associated Press story focused on how, under the Obama administration, the Justice Department has aggressively stepped up prosecutions of people under the federal FACE law. After a sting of abortion violence decades ago, Congress passed and pro-abortion President Bill Clinton signed the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances to make it so those few people who take the law into their own hands are prosecuted. While the Bush administration only used the law to charge one person, the Obama administration has already targeted six people via FACE.

The charges weren’t always cases of significant violence and included one man who engaged in time-honored protest by blocking the door of a Texas abortion clinic with his body so people could not enter the facility. A Florida woman used her car to prevent another vehicle from entering the parking lot of an abortion business in her community.

At the same time, the Obama administration has not used the law to target any abortion activists who engage in actions that are violent towards pro-life people. James Pouillon was peacefully protesting outside a Michigan high school to teach students about the reality of abortion when he was gunned down by Harlan Drake, a pro-choice person who didn’t like his graphic sign and shot and killed him. The FACE law never entered the equation.

Now, one pro-life legal group, the Life Legal Defense Foundation, says the Obama administration is going even further. Officials with LLDF say the Obama administration is targeting peaceful pro-life people who are not engaging in any violent or illegal activities but merely exercising their free speech rights to offer alternatives information and help to women outside of an abortion center.

In January 2010, David Hamilton was peacefully and lawfully handing literature to women entering EMW Surgical Center, an abortion clinic in Louisville, Kentucky. He was not only interfered with illegally by abortion facility volunteers who locked arms to block him from talking to women, he is now being prosecuted by the U.S. Department of Justice for allegedly assaulting a volunteer who actually assaulted him. The “escort” attempted to forcibly block Hamilton to prevent him from sharing literature with women entering the clinic that explained other options to them.

Over a year after the date of the incident, rather than serving the clinic volunteer with a legal complaint for the illegal conduct, the Department of Justice served Hamilton with a legal complaint, alleging that he violated the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act.

Read more.