A government-funded database, led by the University of Maryland and ostensibly established to track “radicalization,” is targeting a major pro-life group as “terrorists.”
Students for Life of America (SFLA), which has 1,400 chapters at campuses across the country, “appears under a ‘Terrorist Group’ label in the raw dataset,” according to a Monday article in The College Fix.
The database, called the “Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States” (PIRUS), was funded in part by grants from the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security’s Center for the Study of Terrorism and Behavior (CSTAB). According to the project’s website, PIRUS is a “quantitative dataset of individuals in the United States who radicalized to the point of violent or non-violent ideologically motivated criminal activity, or ideologically motivated association with a foreign or domestic extremist organization from 1948 until 2021.”
The PIRUS database overwhelmingly targets “right-wing” offenders, with more than 1,700 identified compared to fewer than 550 labeled “left-wing.” Ideological subcategories include tabs for “anti-abortion,” “Christian identity,” and “anti-LGBT” but not for far-left radical abortion groups such as those behind the attacks on pregnancy centers or threats to Supreme Court justices.
“We are very concerned about government-funded programs engaging in viewpoint discrimination as they attempt to insinuate that there may be future harms from peaceful pro-life people,” Kristi Hamrick, a spokeswoman for SFLA told the Fix.
According to LifeSiteNews, a pro-life website, “The PIRUS database lists two individuals associated with SFLA who match the description of student members who were arrested in 2020 for attempting to chalk ‘black pre-born lives matter’ on a sidewalk outside of a Planned Parenthood center.”
“The pro-lifers were arrested despite being told verbally by police that they would not be prevented from painting and having been instructed to use tempura (sic) paint,” LifeSiteNews reported.
A federal court in Washington, D.C., ruled in August that the government violated the pro-life demonstrators’ First Amendment rights by engaging in viewpoint discrimination.
Meanwhile, President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ) has escalated federal efforts to crack down on Christians, including Catholics and pro-life activists, by labeling them as domestic extremists.
[READ: 5 Times The Biden Admin Persecuted Christians For Living Their Faith]
According to an October 2022 review of Justice Department press releases by The Federalist, that year the DOJ announced the indictments of 22 pro-life activists and not a single pro-abortion extremist who firebombed pregnancy centers. Among those arrested was Paul Vaughn, one of a handful of people convicted for the crime of praying at a Tennessee abortion facility. If his appeal fails, Vaughn, a father of 11, could face up to 11 years in prison and fines of up to $260,000.
The Justice Department claims the pro-life demonstrators, “aided and abetted by one another, used force and physical obstruction to injure, intimidate and interfere with employees of the clinic and a patient who was seeking reproductive health services.” Video of the demonstration, however, shows the pro-lifers engaging in normal, peaceful Christian activities such as singing, praying, and reading the Bible.
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