An ex-priest, a flier and the arrest that legalized protests at Md. homes

And it’s a key reason why, today, abortion rights activists can picket in front of the suburban Maryland homes of conservative Supreme Court justices.“It’s correct to say that thanks to him, they’re not getting arrested,” said David Rocah, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland.“I was young and crazy then,” Schuller, now 68, reflected last week from his Pittsburgh home.Youngkin, Hogan ask Justice Dept. He saw a bulletin-board flier about a nuclear proliferation protest near D.C., he recalled, “and I said that I’m going to that.”He stayed up until 2 a.m. baking bread, boarded a bus to Maryland the next day with no expectations, and found himself at a Catholic Worker House with some of the Vietnam War era’s most iconic peace activists, including the former priest Philip Berrigan, fresh out of jail for digging a grave in the Pentagon lawn.Schuller knew of Berrigan and his brother David J. In a bulletin to supporters afterward, preserved today in the Berrigan Library Collection at DePaul University, organizers wrote that 40 people came, from Massachusetts, Indiana, Illinois, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Oklahoma.“As a paragon of power, Mr. Rumsfeld had to consider that his high position … does not exempt him from responsibility to our home family,” the bulletin said.The day anti-Vietnam War protesters tried to levitate the PentagonSchuller arrived midway through the last day of protests, he said, and wasn’t there long before the police showed up and said the activists had to leave. Subsequent federal court rulings, he said, have reinforced and strengthened protesters’ right to be in a public arena, so long as they don’t stay still targeting a single home.In justices’ neighborhoods, abortion rights demonstrators are marching.“There seems to be a narrative out there that what people are doing is clearly illegal, and they’re just getting away with it,” Rocah said.