On Monday, a jury acquitted a Catholic father and pro-life activist after the federal government had brought trumped-up charges against him for violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances or FACE Act. The decision was the right one because the case should never have been brought in the first place. It was a clear example of this administration’s anti-religious bigotry and its willingness to stretch the law to meet its ideological ends.

The Biden administration claimed in its charges against Mark Houck that Houck had intimidated or used force to interfere with an abortion provider when he shoved a Planned Parenthood activist near a clinic in 2021. Video footage of the altercation shows that Houck did push the volunteer clinic escort, Bruce Love, but not anywhere near the clinic entrance. In fact, Houck was more than 100 feet away from the clinic entrance.

Moreover, Houck did this only after Love pursued him and his son down the sidewalk, the footage shows. Houck testified in court that Love had been inappropriately taunting his 12-year-old son, saying, “Your dad is a bad person,” and “Your dad is hurting women.” At one point, Love allegedly looked at Houck and said, “Why don’t you go home and masturbate? Go be with your pedophile priests.”

Apart from his grotesque comments in front of a young child, Love’s decision to approach Houck at all was completely out-of-line. Planned Parenthood’s own guidance expressly forbids volunteers from engaging with protesters, yet the CEO for Planned Parenthood Southeast Pennsylvania admitted in court that Love has been spoken to on “numerous occasions” for violating the “non-engagement policy.”

This context matters a great deal because it helps illustrate how flimsy the Justice Department’s case against Houck was in the first place. Houck shoved Love because Love was being a jackass and potentially a threat to his son — not because he was trying to obstruct access to the nearby Planned Parenthood clinic. Even U.S. District Judge Gerald Pappert noted the holes in the DOJ’s case when he asked the federal prosecutor whether the government’s interpretation of the FACE Act in this case “seemed to be stretched a little thin.”

That’s putting it delicately. A more accurate statement would be that Biden’s DOJ deliberately distorted the law in order to persecute Houck. Local authorities never pressed charges against Houck, having determined that the case was too weak. Yet Biden’s prosecutors decided to go for it anyway, threatening to land Houck with up to 11 years in prison. Even worse, they sent the FBI to raid Houck’s home and arrest him in front of his wife and children more than a year after the altercation and despite Houck’s attorney’s assurances that Houck would voluntarily surrender himself if necessary.

I doubt the Biden DOJ thought they’d actually win this case. But that wasn’t the goal anyway. The goal of the charges against Houck and the raid on his family was intimidation. The DOJ wanted to send Houck — and the rest of the pro-life movement, for that matter — a message: interfere with our abortion agenda in any way, and we will come for you.

It’s a tactic the Left has been using with increasing fervor over the past several years. Take, for example, Colorado baker Jack Phillips , who has been hounded in court relentlessly for more than a decade. Just last week, the Colorado Court of Appeals once again ruled against Phillips — this time because he declined on religious grounds to make a cake celebrating a gender transition and another one depicting Satan.

It does not matter that Phillips has already won a case before the Supreme Court or that he will almost certainly win again if this current case continues to advance through the system. The point in this case, as with Houck, is not a legal victory. The point is to make Phillips’s life hell, to force him to endure year after year of legal scrutiny, and all of the fees and court appearances that come with it, until he finally gives up his moral convictions and submits to theirs.

That this tactic has now been adopted at the highest level of government, by Biden’s DOJ, is maddening. No person should have to live in fear of retaliation from the government, and yet too many are discovering that Biden’s administration applies the law in a purposefully heavy-handed and one-sided manner. It is a relief to know that justice was served anyway in Houck’s case, but at what cost?