Salt Lake mayoral candidate Pat Grogan and other Socialist Workers Party city candidates Dave Salner and Nancy Boyasko say they will use their municipal campaigns to mobilize forces against "the danger to democratic rights" they say is embodied in the Wichita, Kan., pro-life demonstrations.

Grogan, who seeks to be Salt Lake City's first female mayor, said in a press release that the U.S. government is openly siding with the "right-wing mobilizations . . . that physically assault, intimidate and threaten women seeking to exercise their legal right to abortion."Salner and Boyasko are running for the Salt Lake City Council.

The pro-life group - Operation Rescue - has been protesting outside Wichita abortion clinics for weeks. A federal judge has ordered the protesters not to obstruct entry to the clinics, and protesters have been arrested and jailed for doing so.

"In the face of this open violation of the law (the protesters' continued obstruction of the clinics), the U.S. government came down squarely on the side of the lawbreakers: The Justice Department has filed a brief that challenges the previous injunction against the clinic blockades," Grogan said. Grogan added that "violations of the law" won't stop in Wichita but may well move to other cities, including Salt Lake City.

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"The stakes go well beyond the right to abortion. If these assaults against women's rights go unanswered, such tactics will increasingly be used against others - strikers on picket lines, immigrant workers, protests against police brutality. This attack is aimed at all our democratic rights: The right to speak out, to assemble, to organize and to protest are all threatened."

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