Black Baptist pastor Walter Hoye has been sentenced 30 days in jail, three years’ probation and fined $1,000 for counseling people against abortion on a public sidewalk outside an abortion facility in Oakland, Calif.

Click on the video embedded with this post, to view the non-violent activity in May 2008 that resulted in Hoye’s conviction last month.

The black pastor is the first person convicted under an Oakland ordinance that bars pro-life counselors from coming within 8 feet of anyone entering an abortion facility, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

At his sentencing hearing yesterday, Hoye told Judge Stuart Hing of Alameda County Superior Court that he would not abide by an order requiring him to stay 100 yards away from the abortion facility where he was arrested.

Said Hoye, “I believe that an unjust law is no law at all.”

The Chronicle’s account of Hoye’s sentencing hearing reads like a passage from a George Orwell novel. 

“Hoye, executive elder of the Progressive Missionary Baptist Church in south Berkeley, hands out anti-abortion literature outside abortion clinics,” the Chronicle reported. “He was arrested May 13 at the Oakland clinic, carrying a sign that read, ‘Jesus loves you and your baby. Let us help you!’

“As women approached the door, he asked them, “May I talk to you about alternatives to the clinic?’”

Continues the Chronicle account, “‘He never laid hands on anyone,’ Levon Yuille, a nondenominational minister from Michigan who flew in for the sentencing, told the judge. Yuille also heads the National Black Pro-Life Congress.”

Calling this sort of activity on public property a “crime” is difficult to comprehend for anyone who believes in the right of free speech, not just pro-life advocates.

Here’s how a pro-abortion activist justified this criminalization of Hoye’s activities, according to the Chronicle account.

“In a statement, Katrina Cantrell, associate executive director of Women’s Health Specialists, said, ‘When anyone restricts access to reproductive health services, every woman affected is a living example of a colonized body.’”

In other words, according to the abortion activist, bearing witness in an utterly non-violent and non-confrontational way about the sanctity of an unborn child’s life to that child’s mother when she is about to enter an abortion facility to allow an abortionist to end her baby’s life, turns the mother into “a living example of a colonized body.”

Welcome to 1984, in Oakland, California.