In an era where imperial state violence requires increasingly elaborate ideological camouflage, the courtroom often succeeds where the diplomatic podium falters. Inside Courtroom 5C of the Edward J. Schwartz United States Courthouse in downtown San Diego on October 21, 2026, the apparatus of American civil rights law underwent an extraordinary transmutation. US District Judge Andrew G. Schopler was asked to decide whether grassroots demonstrators, speaking out against the ongoing slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians, could be prosecuted as criminal saboteurs of religious devotion under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act. Rather than dismissing this obvious legal fiction, Schopler largely denied a motion to dismiss brought by eight community organizers, ruling from the bench that their political picketing could plausibly be punished under a statute originally drafted to protect abortion clinics from far-right bomb threats and violent blockades.

The mechanics of the ruling reveal a disturbing convergence of colonial diplomacy, religious nationalism, and domestic legal repression. The case, Christian and Jewish Alliance Inc. v. Brunner, was filed in November 2025 by First Liberty Institute, a well-funded conservative legal outfit that specializes in expanding Christian conservative exemptions while curtailing secular and progressive liberties. Representing an interfaith advocacy group and The Mission Church of Carlsbad, California, the litigators argued that hosting a lecture by former Israeli diplomat and Knesset member Einat Wilf was not a secular political event, but an indivisible act of sacred Christian prayer. Because pro-Palestinian demonstrators entered the hall to interrupt Wilf’s geopolitical lecture with anti-occupation slogans, and later chanted outside the premises with megaphones, the church claimed its flock had been subjected to the kind of violent terror the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act was built to deter.

When defense counsel pointed out that Wilf is a secular politician defending the state policies of a foreign military power, First Liberty Institute attorney John Brinkerhoff insisted without hesitation: The entire event was worship. The whole thing was. Judge Schopler accepted this premise for the preliminary stage of litigation, observing that the defense was plausibly aware that the natural and probable consequences during a Wednesday night worship event would interfere with a worship exercise, even if their intent was to not disrupt such an exercise. In doing so, the court did not merely resolve an esoteric point of federal procedure. It established a dangerous legal beachhead: that an imperial state’s public relations campaign, when wrapped in the liturgical vestments of biblical prophecy, can immunize itself from political dissent under the threat of federal statutory penalties.

The Sanctification of Colonial Violence

To grasp the gravity of Schopler’s decision, one must examine how the language of the sacred has been mobilized throughout modern history to shield conquest from moral scrutiny. The imperial project has never functioned purely through bullets, bulldozers, and blockades; it requires a cultural and linguistic apparatus capable of laundering brutality into piety. When the French colonized Algeria, they spoke of an indivisible mission civilisatrice; when the British consolidated their grip on the Nile, high administrators like Lord Cromer portrayed colonial subjection as a sacred obligation to civil order and divine stewardship. In every instance, the violence visited upon the native was declared outside the bounds of legitimate political grievance because the imperial power framed its presence as the execution of a transcendent duty.

In the contemporary American imperium, this dynamic finds its most potent expression in Christian Zionism and its strategic partnership with right-wing Israeli statecraft. For decades, theologians and political organizers on the religious right have asserted that unconditional diplomatic and military support for the State of Israel is not a debatable foreign policy stance, but a literal fulfillment of biblical covenant found in Genesis 12:3. As Liat Cohen-Reeis, founder of the Christian and Jewish Alliance, articulated before the President’s Religious Liberty Commission in Washington, DC, earlier this year: As a devout Jew, I believe that Hashem, God created an everlasting covenant with Abraham described in the Torah. My religious beliefs call on me to support and pray for Israel as a safe homeland for the Jewish people. . . . An integral part of my religious, ethnic, and cultural identity is Zionism.

There is, of course, no question that individuals possess a constitutional right to hold whatever theological doctrines they choose. But the maneuver executed in the San Diego federal courtroom carries this theological claim across a perilous threshold. It demands that the state enforce this dogma against secular citizens. If an evangelical congregation decides that listening to a former foreign diplomat justify the bombardment of residential neighborhoods in Gaza is an act of sacramental communion, the law, under Schopler’s logic, must accept that characterization at face value. Any citizen who appears on the sidewalk to challenge that diplomat’s claims is no longer treated as a participant in First Amendment political debate. Instead, they are transformed by judicial alchemy into religious bigots engaged in the unlawful desecration of a sanctuary.

The reality on the ground makes this theater of sanctified innocence impossible to sustain. Over seventy-five thousand Palestinians have been killed by Israeli military operations since October 2023, their communities leveled, their universities pulverized, their ancestral olive groves eradicated under tank treads. These are material facts, verified by international humanitarian bodies and documented daily in horrific clarity. When ordinary American citizens gather to picket an institution hosting an architect of that state’s political narrative, they are responding directly to an unfolding catastrophe funded by their own tax dollars. To claim that their motivation is animus against Christian prayer or Jewish liturgy is an inversion of reality. It converts the victimizers into victims and recasts an urgent cry against genocide as an unprovoked assault on faith.

The Distortion of Statutory Purpose

The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, commonly known as the FACE Act (18 USC § 248), was enacted by Congress under President Bill Clinton in 1994. Its historical context could not be clearer. Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, organized anti-abortion extremist networks such as Operation Rescue waged a campaign of paramilitary terror against reproductive healthcare facilities across the United States. Doctors were stalked and assassinated in clinic parking lots; nurses were subjected to bomb threats; physical barricades were welded across entrance gates to prevent women from obtaining medical care. Congress stepped in with federal criminal sanctions and private civil causes of action to halt targeted physical obstruction and domestic terrorism.

To inoculate the statute against constitutional challenges under the Commerce Clause and the Equal Protection Clause, lawmakers inserted an ancillary provision that extended similar protections to places of religious worship. For thirty years, this secondary clause functioned exactly as common sense dictated: it protected churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples from arson, physical desecration, cross-burnings, and violent invasions intended to deny congregants their right to gather for sacred rites. Never in the three-decade history of the FACE Act did its architects contemplate that it would be repurposed by corporate legal foundations to shield political seminars and real estate events from political picketers.

Yet that is precisely the doctrine First Liberty Institute has constructed in Southern California. The plaintiffs’ complaint targets three specific demonstrations during 2025. The first, on March 19, 2025, occurred at The Mission Church in Carlsbad, where approximately four hundred people assembled for an event marketed as an opportunity to worship and learn about how to support Israel. Demonstrators allegedly entered using aliases, stood up at staggered intervals to shout anti-occupation slogans during Wilf’s geopolitical presentation, and were subsequently escorted out by private security before continuing their protest on the sidewalk outside. The second was an Easter Sunday protest in April 2025 outside the same facility. The third occurred on September 7, 2025, outside the outdoor amphitheater at the Legacy International Center in San Diego’s Mission Valley—a multimillion-dollar commercial resort, conference center, and hotel complex originally established by televangelist Morris Cerullo. Demonstrators picketed in the parking lot with signs and megaphones, reportedly slapping the hoods of passing cars.

In their motion to dismiss, defense counsel—civil rights attorneys Thomas B. Harvey, Ben Gharagozli, and Mark Kleiman—laid bare the statutory sleight of hand. They argued that these gatherings were political rallies designed to manufacture consent for foreign military operations, that a commercial conference resort cannot reasonably be categorized as a statutory house of worship, and that applying federal statutory liability to sidewalk picketing constitutes a flagrant violation of core First Amendment speech. In their filings, defense counsel noted plainly: Religious support for political views, no matter how strongly they are held, should not be weaponized to infringe upon the freedom of expression of others.

Nevertheless, Judge Schopler swept these objections aside, concluding that because the plaintiffs alleged that worship activities occurred at the resort, and because the natural and probable consequence of a noisy demonstration during an evening program is distraction or disruption, the lawsuit could proceed to full discovery. While the judge did deny the plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction—wisely declining to impose an unconstitutional prior restraint that would have barred named defendants from peaceable assembly near the properties—his refusal to throw out the FACE Act claims arms conservative litigators with a terrifying weapon of administrative and financial attrition.

The Atlantic Divide in Judicial Reason

Judge Schopler’s ruling in San Diego does not exist in a vacuum; its radicalism becomes unmistakable when set beside a landmark decision issued just three weeks earlier on the opposite coast. On October 2, 2026, Senior US District Judge Katharine S. Hayden of the US District Court for the District of New Jersey dismissed an almost identical federal lawsuit in United States v. Party for Socialism and Liberation New Jersey.

In that case, the Department of Justice, led in this initiative by Civil Rights Division Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, had deployed the FACE Act against anti-war activists who picketed a West Orange synagogue. But the synagogue was not being picketed for its Shabbat prayers; it was hosting an exhibition marketing real estate in illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. Judge Hayden saw through the government’s manufactured piety. In a meticulous opinion, she dismissed the complaint, ruling that the demonstrators were not targeting religious exercise, but were instead engaging in protected political opposition to illegal territorial dispossession and commercial property sales. The physical presence of a religious structure, Hayden made clear, does not grant an automatic diplomatic immunity to commercial transactions or geopolitical campaigns conducted inside its walls.

Reacting to the New Jersey ruling, Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, noted that the executive branch was abusing its authority to carry out an ideological agenda and punish viewpoints with which it disagrees. By filing this lawsuit, the Government has engaged in blatant viewpoint discrimination using the power of the state to bring meritless litigation in order to censor and punish based on viewpoint. Her colleague, PCJF legal director Carl Messineo, emphasized that the litigation represented a coordinated effort at lawfare, the weaponization of government law enforcement to suppress lawful protest and shield US-backed Israeli actions to dispossess Palestinians of their homeland.

The divergence between Judge Hayden in Newark and Judge Schopler in San Diego lays bare the fundamental philosophical fissure now running through the federal judiciary. Judge Hayden recognized the ancient democratic distinction between the sanctuary and the forum, between the sacred liturgy of the soul and the secular operations of commerce and war. Judge Schopler, by contrast, succumbed to the plaintiffs’ theological conflation. By ruling that political organizers can be held liable if their demonstrations predictably rattle the composure of attendees at a geopolitical seminar, Schopler has invited every political faction in the country to host its controversial policy summits inside church halls, daring the public to picket them at the risk of federal bankruptcy.

The Shadow of Claiborne Hardware

To understand the constitutional stakes of this tactical innovation, one must recall the legal battlefields of the Civil Rights Movement. More than forty years ago, the Supreme Court confronted an identical strategy in NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co. (1982). In the late 1960s, Black citizens in Claiborne County, Mississippi, launched a sustained, community-wide boycott of white-owned merchants to demand desegregation, voting rights, and municipal employment. The merchants retaliated by suing the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and hundreds of individual activists, securing millions of dollars in state court damages for the economic injury, business disruptions, and social intimidation caused by the boycott and its sidewalk picketers.

The Supreme Court rejected that effort unanimously. Writing for the Court, Justice John Paul Stevens established what remains a bedrock principle of American jurisprudence: peaceful political protest, boycotts, and speech directed at redressing public wrongs and racial subjugation cannot be converted into common-law torts or suppressed through economic ruin. The Court acknowledged that political speech is often passionate, offensive, and disruptive; it acknowledged that picketers create social tension and deter patrons from entering commercial storefronts. But Stevens insisted that in a free society, the right of the people to organize collectively against state-sanctioned injustice must reign supreme over the commercial comfort of those upholding the status quo.

The litigation in San Diego is designed specifically to circumvent the protections of Claiborne Hardware. Conservative litigators understand that they cannot easily sue pro-Palestinian protesters for common-law defamation or tortious interference without running headlong into the First Amendment. Instead, they reach for the FACE Act because it contains statutory damage provisions, mandatory attorney fee awards, and civil penalties that can utterly destroy the financial lives of working-class activists before a jury ever hears the evidence.

Consider the eight named defendants in the Carlsbad lawsuit: Daniel Brunner, Aimee Magda Werth, Kristina Turner-Brown, Patrick Hartley, Sasha Spite Miller, Jacob Pagaduan, Jonathan Provance, and Maya Karalius. These are not state actors, corporate lobbyists, or well-heeled political consultants. They are local organizers, teachers, students, and community members who stood on public sidewalks, held placards, and raised their voices against the slaughter of families half a world away. By forcing these individuals into the grueling machinery of federal discovery—requiring them to produce personal communications, surrender social media records, sit for hostile depositions, and face astronomical legal bills—the plaintiffs achieve their true objective regardless of the final verdict. The process itself becomes the punishment.

The Machinery of Administrative Erasure

This weaponization of religious liberty statutes does not occur in isolation. It forms the judicial flank of a broader, systemic campaign across the United States to purge the Palestinian catastrophe from public consciousness and criminalize domestic solidarity. When high school students walk out of class, they face disciplinary suspensions; when tenured professors analyze the history of Zionist land expropriation, they are threatened with termination; when college students erect encampments on campus lawns, university administrators summon riot police to beat and arrest them under the pretext of maintaining student safety.

In the federal courts of New York and Massachusetts, civil rights attorneys are currently battling retaliatory investigations, deportations, and visa revocations orchestrated by federal agencies against foreign students and scholars who dared to speak the name of Palestine. In the California State Capitol in Sacramento, conservative lawmakers have introduced measures like Senate Bill 1070, which seeks to reclassify any disruption of a religious gathering into a felony carrying up to three years in state prison. Everywhere one looks, the institutional response to anti-war protest is uniform: procedural entrapment, bureaucratic surveillance, and the systematic redefinition of political dissent as unlawful terror.

Pastor J.C. Cooper of The Mission Church has maintained that his sanctuary is entirely innocent of politics, telling reporters: These worship services are meant to glorify Jesus, to gather people together, and in no way, shape, or form are going after another group of people. We are there to learn about God’s word. We should be able to use our front doors freely to come and go.

It is an impeccably crafted statement, calibrated for public consumption. But it conceals the material reality of what occurred on March 19, 2025. One does not invite a former foreign diplomat and parliamentarian to lecture an audience of four hundred people on how to politically and materially support a state’s military apparatus and then claim, with a straight face, that the gathering had nothing to do with earthly power. To invite an architect of state policy into the sanctuary is to invite the world into the sanctuary. And when the state whose policies are being championed is actively engaged in the destruction of an entire society, the citizens of that sanctuary cannot retreat into the pretense of spiritual seclusion the moment their neighbors arrive outside to demand accountability.

The Contrapuntal Reality

To read this legal battle contrapuntally—to set the polished proceedings of the San Diego federal courthouse beside the physical reality of the people whose suffering occasioned the protest—is to expose the profound moral bankruptcy of the entire enterprise. While Judge Schopler and the attorneys of First Liberty Institute debate whether a horn sounded in a suburban California parking lot infringed upon the delicate sensibilities of an evangelical audience, thousands of families in northern Gaza are digging through concrete rubble with their bare fingers, searching for the remains of their children buried by American-manufactured munitions.

What is being litigated in San Diego is not the integrity of Christian worship, nor the safety of church doors. What is being litigated is the imperial monopoly on representation. The ruling seeks to preserve a world in which Western institutions may freely host, celebrate, and underwrite the instruments of colonial subjugation, while ensuring that the screams of the subjugated—and the voices of those who stand in solidarity with them—are legally forbidden from disturbing the quiet afternoon of the faithful.

As the case proceeds into discovery before Magistrate Judge Allison H. Goddard, and as Judge Schopler considers the defendants’ pending anti-SLAPP (strategic lawsuit against public participation) motion challenging the plaintiffs’ pendent state trespass claims, the path forward will test whether American civil rights law can withstand its own grotesque appropriation. If a geopolitical rally can be converted into a holy sacrament simply because it is held beneath a crucifix, and if political picketing can be penalized as a civil rights violation under the FACE Act, then the freedom of assembly guaranteed by the First Amendment is reduced to a hollow formality, granted only when power finds it convenient.

The organizers who stood outside The Mission Church and the Legacy International Center understood what the federal courts are desperate to obscure: that there is nothing holy about state violence, nothing sacred about territorial conquest, and no piety to be found in silencing the cries of the dispossessed. In confronting the machinery of lawfare, they are defending not merely their own right to speak, but the essential moral claim that human life, everywhere and without exception, matters more than the imperial dogmas constructed to justify its destruction.