Blanche’s Justice Department has finally put parents’ rights ahead of abortionists

Although Todd Blanche was just confirmed as attorney general earlier this month, he has already made an important mark for religious liberty and parental rights.

On July 23, Blanche issued updated guidance to federal agencies on religious liberty protections. The bulk of the document does what these memos usually do. It walks agencies through a decade’s worth of Supreme Court decisions — Carson v. Makin, Kennedy v. Bremerton School Dist., Fulton v. City of Philadelphia — and tells them to comply with the Constitution and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act on the front end rather than be dragged back into court for the inevitable.

One instruction stands out: Agencies must now also account for precedent confirming that the Constitution protects parents’ authority to direct their children’s upbringing. That is a notable thing to say out loud, given where the Civil Rights Division previously spent its time on matters affecting the family. Its most visible civil rights initiative in recent years was not protecting parents but preventing people from becoming parents in the first place. 

Passed in 1994, the FACE Act was the Biden administration’s preferred vehicle for running dragnets against political objectors. Biden’s Civil Rights Division worked hand in glove with the abortion industry, taking tips and target lists from those groups and sweeping up sidewalk counselors indiscriminately. I saw an earlier version of this firsthand as a trial lawyer in the Civil Rights Division section that enforced the FACE Act in the late 1990s. (My request to be exempted from those........

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