Washington, D.C. — You may have heard the name Mark Houck. Or perhaps — maybe — you heard what happened to him? He was arrested last September. Or, for a clearer picture: FBI agents stormed his home early one Saturday morning, waking — and shocking — Houck and his wife Ryan-Marie and all their young children. To this day, one of the youngest is still having nightmares about the event.
His supposed crime? A year before, in October 2021, he shoved a pro-choice Planned Parenthood clinic volunteer who was harassing his eleven-year-old son. If you talk with Houck, he will tell you that it wasn’t his first move. He politely asked the man to stop shouting obscenities at his son. Shoving was not his first resort — but more like the eventual protective instinct of a father.
Almost a year later, the Department of Justice decided to make a federal case of the incident. He was acquitted, but the alarm about government overreach remains. Former attorney general Michael Mukasey said as much, calling out the DOJ during a speech last week at National Review Institute’s Ideas Summit. He’s troubled about the lawlessness and its impact on Houck’s family, noting that the arrest was made “in the morning at Houck’s home in front of his wife and children, by FBI agents wearing tactical vests and helmets and carrying long guns.”
Mukasey emphasized:
Whatever your views on the issue of abortion, this was a clear attempt to intimidate someone who was advocating the pro-life position. As you may know, Mr. Houck was acquitted of the charge at trial, but that in no way diminishes the damage done by his prosecution and the manner of his arrest.
The former attorney general also brought up the current DOJ’s “lackadaisical approach to the prosecution of pro-choice advocates who commit violence — including arson — at facilities that offer pro-life counseling to pregnant women considering abortion. Only after a torrent of unfavorable publicity has the Justice Department brought any of these cases.”
He cited as well the protests last summer outside the homes of Supreme Court justices — probably the most well-known of the recent attacks against pro-life Americans, who, whatever you think of abortion, are seeking less violence, not more. I think of the pacifist Dorothy Day, who was naturally against abortion, after her conversion to Catholicism and after her miserable experience of her own abortion earlier in life.
Mukasey noted:
It is a federal misdemeanor to picket or parade or use any sound truck or similar device near the residence of a federal judge for the purpose of influencing that judge in the discharge of a judicial duty. For months, particularly since the leak of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs opinion that overturned Roe v. Wade, demonstrators have been picketing and using bullhorns and noisemakers near the homes of Supreme Court justices to protest that decision and otherwise to influence the outcome of any subsequent litigation on the subject of abortion.
He pointed to what should outrage people of every political persuasion and none:
None of those demonstrators have been arrested. The contrast with the arrest of Mark Houck in Pennsylvania could not be more stark, but the attorney general’s explanation at a Senate Judiciary Committee Oversight hearing in February, for failure to arrest demonstrators who daily violate a federal statute, was that the decision to arrest or not lay with the U.S. marshals who protect the Supreme Court justices. That explanation simply doesn’t survive the laugh test. The marshals’ service is a law-enforcement agency within the Department of Justice; the head of the marshals’ service reports to the attorney general.
Mukasey has dedicated his life to law, not electoral politics, and it clearly grieved him to conclude: “And so the technique of making the process the penalty now finds its mirror image in the technique of making the absence of the process the penalty. And the message for the rest of us is that we had better win the next election or get used to it.”
Mukasey made these remarks at the inaugural James L. Buckley Lecture on principled leadership NRI. Buckley has served in all three branches of the federal government and just turned 100. Listening to Mukasey, thinking about the trauma so unnecessarily unleashed on the Houck family, and knowing the respect Buckley has for human dignity, I couldn’t help but pray that we long for principled leadership. We may disagree on whether or not CVS should be dispensing abortion pills — including in states where abortion has been restricted — but can we agree that families shouldn’t be intimidated into silence? Mark Houck and his son were praying that day in Philadelphia. I’ve done that, too, in New York and elsewhere, because we believe that prayer is actually action — submitting all of this mess to an authority higher than this arena of political manipulation and intimidation.
I ran into Mark and Ryan-Marie Houck recently. If you don’t agree with us on abortion and have in your head a caricature of what a couple with seven children might look and sound like, they will rock your world. We need to meet, listen to, and interact with one another more. We need to be willing to come together in agreement that the government shouldn’t use its power to punish political opponents.
Abortion shouldn’t even be the political issue it is. The constant yelling pours salt in people’s open wounds, especially those of women. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons that these instances of government abuse don’t get the coverage they should — or stir bipartisan outrage. Because most reasonable people don’t want abortion to be a political issue. Which is precisely why we all should step up to the plate in bolder and more-loving ways to help the women and girls and potential families in our lives, not leaving the issue to politics to worsen and make cruelly impersonal, on an issue where you can’t get more intimate.
The Houck family is part of the solution, working to help women choose life with both prayer and friendship. I had no idea what Mukasey would talk about at the Ideas Summit. It was refreshing to hear a former attorney general speak up for the kind of Americans we need as neighbors. The Houcks, Mukasey, and Buckley give us ideas about what principled leadership looks like. I think we can still know it when we see it. I pray we still treasure it when we see it. And encourage it.
This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.