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| Photo credit: American Life League / Flickr |
TCAPP meets outside a Planned Parenthood clinic in Spokane Washington once per month at the facility's closing time to hold worship services and speak out against the injustice of abortion. Earlier this year, the Planned Parenthood clinic issued a lawsuit against the organization for allegedly violating a noise ordinance created by the city council.
"At first they tried to drown us out with their own sound and their own protesters, but we kept singing, praying and praising God under our First Amendment rights of assembly and freedom of religion," Peters said. He further said that the group actively lowered its decibel levels to comply with the ordinance, as attested by the local police department.
“[W]e’re listening to noise levels, we’re taking complaints, and code enforcement officers are using the decibel meters,” police department spokesperson Julie Humphreys said. “We’re actively enforcing what we’re asked to.”
Planned Parenthood claims that the police department is in league with TCAPP, and isn't enforcing the ordinance correctly, but Peters says that the lawsuit is malicious.
“You have a billion-dollar industry suing local church pastors that aren’t wealthy at all, for singing and peaceable assembly,” he said. “We’ve been running for two years. We’ve never been cited. We don’t cause destruction. We don’t loot. We don’t riot. We literally go to Planned Parenthood and we hold church once a month. We do this after hours. We are not causing any harm.”
