Operation Rescue asserted that its members had not violated section 1985(3), claiming that the statute requires a class-based, discriminatory animus underlying the action.

Following an expedited trial, the District Court ruled that petitioners had violated section 1985(3) by conspiring to deprive women seeking abortions of their right to interstate travel.

Va. 1989)[3] The court found that Bray and others had blocked access to the clinics, therefore depriving women seeking abortions of the right to interstate travel.

In the decision delivered by Justice Antonin Scalia, the court rejected the claim that "women who want abortions" is a class that could satisfy the suggestion in Griffin that discrimination as contemplated under Section 1984(s) could extend beyond the issue of race.

He concludes that "Given the difficulty of the question, this is understandable, but the dissenters' inability to agree on a single rationale confirms, in my view, the correctness of the Court's opinion.

The federal balance is a fragile one, and a false step in interpreting § 1985(3) risks making a whole catalog of ordinary state crimes a concurrent violation of a single congressional statute passed more than a century ago."

The opinion supports the court's decision insofar as it relies on stare decisis, but disagrees with the Griffin and Carpenters "rights guaranteed against private encroachment" and "class-based animus" requirements.

In his opinion, Justice Scalia characterizes Souter's approach as "(1) undertaking a full-dress reconsideration of Griffin and Carpenters, (2) concluding that both those cases were wrongly decided, and (3) limiting the damage of those supposed errors by embracing an interpretation of the statute that concededly gives the same language in two successive clauses completely different meanings."

In Justice Stevens' view, the protesters "... engaged in a nationwide conspiracy; to achieve their goal they repeatedly occupied public streets and trespassed on the premises of private citizens in order to prevent or hinder the constituted authorities from protecting access to abortion clinics by women, a substantial number of whom traveled in interstate commerce to reach the destinations blockaded by petitioners.

It presents a striking contemporary example of the kind of zealous, politically motivated, lawless conduct that led to the enactment of the Ku Klux Act in 1871 and gave it its name."

Justice O'Connor characterizes Griffin's requirement of a "class-based animus" as a shorthand description of the types of actions that the statute is meant to address.

However, she agreed with the dissent in Carpenters that "... Congress had in mind a functional definition of the scope of [§ 1985(3)]," and intended to "provide a federal remedy for all classes that seek to exercise their legal rights in unprotected circumstances similar to those of the victims of Klan violence."

She concludes that the action of blocking access to an abortion clinic is class-based within the meaning of Griffin because it is directly related to the unique abilities of women to become pregnant and to terminate their pregnancies.