By Jonathon Van Maren

Noting the pro-abortion bias of the media is at this point so cliché that the point is almost not worth making. Nonetheless, I’d like to make a couple of observation about the double standard that was present yesterday at the March for Life, where abortion activists illegally blocked a legal and peaceful protest by pro-life activists.

It was no surprise that the abortion activists were out in force with all sorts of crude signs (these are the same people that complain people might be offended by seeing abortion victim photography, of course), and that once again, a prominent symbol they wielded was the Communist hammer and sickle, the flag that flapped over the gulags and the murder of millions. The banner at the front of their illegal mob read “End the March for Life,” with the hammer and sickle painted on it. These folks are impervious to irony.

I’ve written about these flags at the March for Life before, and I’ve also noted that if our politicians and the media had a shred of honesty, they would be reporting on the affiliations of these thugs—which they would certainly be doing if the protestors had any affiliation that could be portrayed as conservative or right-wing:

The Soviet Union wracked up a death toll of over twenty million, with nearly two million people perishing in the gulags and nearly a million being summarily executed in the first years of Stalin’s rule. Mao’s Red China took it even further, with an estimated 45 million Chinese perishing during the Great Leap Forward—which was actually fewer dead bodies than Mao had been anticipating. He originally thought that 52 million peasants would have to die in order for Communism to be sufficiently implemented. The flag that flapped over these staggering death counts was the Hammer and Sickle, a flag now proudly waved by those purporting to protest totalitarianism.

Just imagine, for a moment, if it was pro-life protestors who decided to illegally interrupt and barricade a pro-abortion march. In a flash, Justin Trudeau would be wheezing his outrage into the dutifully clustered cameras, and probably advocating for a bubble zone of at least fifty metres around every abortion activist in the country. Pro-lifers are lawbreakers, he and his parrots in the media and commentariat would declare, and thus new laws would be immediately necessary. But if it is peaceful pro-life Canadians that are subject to illegal harassment, then whatever.

But of course, it was pro-lifers who were illegally barricaded by crude, hostile protestors, and thus there is no talk of law-breaking, or potential violence, or even criticism of any kind. You can get away with violence against pro-lifers pretty easily—and as I’ve noted before, pro-life activists are subject to harassment, threats, and violence all the time. Joyce Arthur of the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada even justified violence against pro-lifers by saying that pro-life activism simply “provokes” people. Additionally, abortion activists regularly make false accusations against pro-lifers—but when they are exposed, it makes barely a ripple in the same media outlets that had gleefully published every detail of the false allegations.

So there you have it. For months, the Canadian media has falsely declared that bubble zones are necessary because of pro-life harassment, without providing a shred of evidence for their assertion. But when peaceful pro-life protestors are blockaded off by angry lawbreakers wielding a symbol that has presided over more murders than the Nazi swastika in Canada’s capital? Not a whisper.