Texas Supreme Court Upholds Pro-Life Freedom of Speech

The Texas Supreme Court handed down a major ruling on Friday, rejecting an effort by pro-abortion groups to silence a pro-life advocate who equated abortion with murder. 

The Lilith Fund for Reproductive Equity and The Afiya Center and Texas Equal Access Fund filed nearly identical lawsuits against pro-life activist Mark Lee Dickson and Right to Life East Texas in Travis County in 2020, accusing Dickson of defamation for referring to them as “criminal organizations” and equating abortion with murder.

The Texas Supreme Court ultimately decided that Dickson’s statements are “protected opinion about abortion law made in pursuit of changing the law, placing them at the heart of protect speech under the United States and Texas Constitutions,” Justice Jane Bland wrote in the opinion of of the court, adding:

Such opinions are constitutionally protected even when the speaker applies them to specific advocacy groups that support abortion rights. In our state and nation, an advocate is free to speak, write or publish his opinions on any subject, perhaps most especially on controversial subjects like legalized abortion,

The dispute between Dickson, who is the director with Right To Life of East Texas, and the pro-abortion organizations began in 2019, when Dickson successfully lobbied the Waskom, Texas, city council to pass an ordinance declaring the town to be a “Sanctuary City for the Unborn.” That ordinance states that abortion is “an act of murder with malice aforethought” and it conditionally criminalizes aiding or abetting most abortions should the United States Supreme Court overrule Roe v. Wade. The ordinance initially listed the pro-abortion groups, among others, as “criminal organizations” that “perform abortions and assist others in obtaining abortions.”

However, the ordinance was not the subject of the lawsuits, but rather Dickson’s speech in the wake of the ordinance’s passage. Soon after the city passed the ordinance, Dickson posted statements about it to his Facebook and to the Right to Life East Texas Facebook page. The court opinion reads:

In his posts, he encouraged others to join his campaign to bring similar ordinances to other Texas cities. In one post, he asks readers to sign a petition favoring such ordinances. In another, he quotes the Ordinance and identifies the plaintiffs in this case as ‘criminal organizations.’ In other posts, Dickson writes that the plaintiffs ‘exist to help pregnant Mothers murder their babies’ and ‘murder innocent unborn children.’

In June of 2020, the plaintiffs wrote to both Dickson and Right to Life East Texas asking Dickson to retract his statements. Dickson did not reply, and a week later, the pro-abortion groups filed two separate defamation lawsuits. Dickson and Right to Life East Texas moved to dismiss both suits under the Texas Citizens Participation Act, and said that his statements represent his opinion about abortion and are a part of his advocacy to change the laws on abortion.

Two courts of appeals considered whether Dickson’s statements were defamatory: one court of appeals ordered the suit dismissed, while another permitted the defamation suit to continue. The Texas Supreme Court said that, upon examination of his statements, their context “shows no abuse of the constitutional right to freely speak” and that Dickson “did not urge or threaten violence, nor did he misrepresent the underlying conduct in expressing his opinions about it.”

The opinion reads:

The Texas Citizens Participation Act provides for early dismissal of lawsuits that chill a citizen’s exercise of free speech unless the lawsuit has merit. Because the speaker in this case properly invoked the Act and the plaintiffs failed to adduce evidence of defamation in response, these cases must be dismissed. Accordingly, we affirm the judgment of the court of appeals that dismissed the defamation suit before it, and we reverse the judgment of the court of appeals that permitted the companion suit to advance.

…

In dismissing these cases, we express no opinion on the opinions of others. Instead, we return both sides of the abortion debate to the battlefield of speech where it belongs. If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.

The court added that “perhaps no speech more deserves and requires protection from governmental censure than that critical of the government and its decisions” and that any limitation that defamation law places on free speech “may not muzzle a speaker from asserting an opinion in an ongoing debate about the law.”

Dickson told Breitbart News in a statement that he is “thankful that the Lilith Fund, which shares a name with a demon that preys on women and children, was not successful in their attempt to stop [him] from referring to their organization as a criminal organization involved in the murder of innocent children.”

“I hope the Lilith Fund and the other two abortion assistance groups get out of the baby-murdering business,” Dickson said.

“Right To Life of East Texas is thankful for everyone who has been supportive of our work and who have fought alongside us since our work began in 1976, but we are especially thankful for those who were involved in our recent representation before the Supreme Court of Texas,” he continued. “Abortion is murder, the abortion industry is involved in the murder of innocent children, and we will continue to speak out against these criminal organizations who have a reputation of hurting women and ending the lives of their children.”

The case is The Lilith Fund for Reproductive Equity v. Dickson, No. 21-0978 in the Supreme Court of Texas. 

Editor’s Note: This story was revised for clarity and to add quotes from East Texas Right To Life Director Mark Lee Dickson.