Paul Vaughn, a Christian father of 11 convicted under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act for praying outside an abortion clinic, testified Wednesday that the weaponization of the U.S. Justice Department against pro-lifers is more than a catchphrase to his family.
It’s their life, he said.
“Since my arrest, I’ve been restricted to the Middle District of Tennessee for over two years under the control and supervision of the federal government,” Vaughn testified during a House Judiciary Committee hearing titled “Revisiting the Implications of the FACE Act.”
“My family spent 20 months of having a potential decade in prison hanging over their heads,” he told lawmakers. “We endured long, stressful days of the actual trial for the sake of government winning a case with no regard to actually seeking justice.”
Vaughn was subjected to a SWAT-style FBI raid of his home in October 2022 in front of his wife and children. He later was charged under the FACE Act and another federal statute called “Conspiracy Against Rights.”
Vaughn prayed and sung hymns, encouraged women seeking abortions to choose life, and spoke to police officers during a pro-life gathering March 2021 at a now-closed abortion facility in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee.
The Christian husband and father was sentenced to three years of supervised release and six months of home confinement after a federal jury trial and guilty verdict in Nashville.
Vaughn told The Daily Signal that his sentence continues to be a daily challenge.
“Right now, my 3-year-old is asking for me, staying with [a] big sister at their house, and our other kids are trying to do finals in the semester,” Vaughn said, and he has to reply that “your dad’s got to go out and speak to these people that raided us and talk about the case.”
“It’s been a horrible ordeal,” he said. “It’s horrible for my children, but I know that God used this in our life.”
But if he could go back to that fateful day when he praying outside the abortion clinic, Vaughn said, he wouldn’t do anything differently.
“Our faith [in God] has grown, and our level of relationship with him has been greatly increased,” Vaughn told The Daily Signal. “There’s an element of knowing that God was doing something there that day, that all the things, all the events, all the media, all these interviews, all these committee hearings are part and parcel to that story, and it’s his story to tell.”
Since 2021, the Biden-Harris administration’s Justice Department has brought criminal or civil cases under the FACE Act against at least 50 pro-life advocates, said Erin Hawley, a senior counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom.
“I think Congress, as well as the American people, will recognize that justice needs to be equal for everyone. And the FACE Act has been enforced against 55 individuals, 50 of them pro-life; that’s simply unacceptable,” Hawley told The Daily Signal. “So at a minimum, it needs to be equal application.”
Vaughn testified that he did nothing outside his constitutionally protected right to free speech and religious freedom.
“I did nothing that day that I’ve not done many times since FACE was passed in 1994,” he said.
He didn’t sit in the abortion clinic, Vaughn said. He broke no laws and wasn’t arrested, he said. But he did pray.
“There is a lot of talk about violence around the issue of abortion,” Vaughn testified.
Although honorable people denounce violence, he said, the pro-abortion narrative fails to account for three types of related violence.
“There is violence committed against every unborn child in every abortion,” Vaughn testified. “There is violence committed by aggravated fathers or other family members of aborted children. And there is violence being done to pro-lifers by our own government. Any serious conversation about violence going forward needs to include these three facts.”
In 1994, Congress passed the FACE Act and President Bill Clinton signed it into law to prevent violence, Vaughn said, but he and his family know the FACE Act now gives violence “the cover of law and places it in the hands of the government.”
If the power to limit abortion has returned to the states because of the Supreme Court’s June 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, he said, so should laws governing abortion.
“At this point, with the overturning of Roe and the long train of abuses [and] the unequal application of the FACE Act, there is no legitimate reason for it to remain on the books,” Vaughn testified. “It’s a tool whose sole purpose is to stifle free speech and abuse the rights of Christian conservatives.”
“There is nothing that the FACE Act does that is not already accomplished by state laws across the land,” he said.
The new Republican majority in the House and Senate effective Jan. 3 must stop the weaponization of the DOJ against pro-lifers, Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, said during the Wednesday hearing.
Roy also called on the second Trump administration to pardon and commute the sentences of pro-lifers targeted by President Joe Biden’s Justice Department using the FACE Act.
In September 2023, Roy introduced a bill to repeal the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, which “prohibits threats of force, obstruction and property damage intended to interfere with reproductive health care services.”
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, soon introduced a Senate version of Roy’s House bill.
Vaughn’s attorney, Stephen Crampton, told The Daily Signal that the process of being targeted by the DOJ is itself the punishment for many pro-lifers.
“Take Mark Houck,” Crampton said, naming a pro-life activist who is a Catholic father of seven. “You get a ‘not guilty’ jury verdict, but look what he went through. And he said to this day, virtually all his family is still suffering kind of PTSD, even from seeing law enforcement. So, you know, the process itself is so horrific.”
“And then, of course, the fact that most of the FACE offenders have been found guilty makes it even worse,” Crampton said. “Now you’re a convicted felon, arguably for the rest of your life.”
