Yesterday, a Charlotte jury found Flip Benham, leader of Operation Save America, guilty of stalking a local abortion provider.
Benham has been a regular visitor at clinics that provide abortions in Charlotte and across the country. He often used a bullhorn to preach and try to convince young women entering the clinic to not go through with the procedure.
In one instance, authorities said he and supporters went to a Charlotte doctor's home and inside his clinic to take photos. They also distributed hundreds of the "Wanted" posters and attached them to doors in the doctor's neighborhood.
Benham was sentenced to 18 months probation and ordered to stop his intimidating practices. He is also barred from coming within 500 feet of the doctor.
Including photos of the inside of the clinic by itself is as egregious an invasion of privacy as it gets. However, Benham even went as far as to get in touch with the doctor's neighbors and call him a murderer. No wonder the jury only took 90 minutes to find him guilty.
Prosecutors also pointed out that doctors George Patterson, David Gunn and George Tiller were all murdered after they were the subjects of "Wanted" posters.
Assistant District Attorney Kristen Northrup argued that Benham was well aware that doctors elsewhere had been killed after similar posters had been circulated.
"What would a reasonable person think if they saw 'Wanted' on a poster with their picture on it," Northrup said.
They also argued that Benham tried to hound the doctor out of his practice. Indeed, the posters had the doctor so spooked that he tints his car windows and never comes to work the same way.
Benham, predictably, complained that his right to free speech had been violated. Give me a break. Taking pictures of someone's house and going inside his clinic to take pictures isn't speech. It's harassment. While Operation Save America claims to eschew violence, Benham is either naive, ignorant or both to think that some yayhoo here in Charlotte wouldn't take this as an invitation to attack the doctor.
