A SWAT team of 25 to 30 FBI agents swarmed the rural Pennsylvania home of pro-life author Mark Houck on Friday and arrested him as his children looked on screaming, a report said.
Houck, the founder and president of The King’s Men, which promotes healing for victims of pornography addiction and promotes Christian virtues, was charged with violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE Act), due to a claimed “attack of a patient escort.”
Houck's wife, Ryan-Marie, told LifeSiteNews that the FBI agents arrived at 7:05 a.m. Friday morning in 15 vehicles and quickly surrounded the house in rural Bucks County with rifles in firing position. “They started pounding on the door and yelling for us to open it.”
Before opening the door, she explained, her husband tried to calm them, saying, “ ‘Please, I’m going to open the door, but, please, my children are in the home. I have seven babies in the house.’ But they just kept pounding and screaming,” she said.
When he opened the door, “they had big, huge rifles pointed at Mark and pointed at me and kind of pointed throughout the house,” Ryan-Marie said.
When the agents stormed into the house, they ordered the children to stay upstairs. “Our staircase is open, so [the kids] were all at the top of the stairs which faces the front door, and I was on the stairs as well, coming down. The kids were all just screaming. It was all just very scary and traumatic,” Ryan-Marie said.
“After they had taken Mark, and the kids were all screaming that he was their best friend, the [FBI agents on her porch] kind of softened a bit. I think they realized what was happening. Or maybe they actually looked at the warrant,” Ryan-Marie explained. “They looked pretty ashamed at what had just happened.”
Ryan-Marie told LifeSiteNews that the charge against Mark Houck of violating the FACE Act comes from an incident that had already been thrown out of the District Court in Philadelphia but was somehow picked up by Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice.
On several occasions when Mark Houck went to sidewalk counsel last year, he took his eldest son, who was only 12 at the time, she explained. For “weeks and weeks,” a “pro-abortion protester” would speak to the boy saying “crude … inappropriate and disgusting things,” such as “you’re dad’s a fag,” and other statements that were too vulgar for her to convey.
Repeatedly, Mark Houck would tell the man that he did not have permission to speak to his son and please refrain from doing so. And “he kept doing it and kind of came into [the son’s] personal space” obscenely ridiculing his father. At this point, “Mark shoved him away from his child, and the guy fell back.”
“He didn’t have any injuries or anything, but he tried to sue Mark,” and the case was thrown out of court in the early summer, Ryan-Marie said.
In a press release, the DOJ stated that, in the first count of the Sept. 20 indictment, Houck allegedly “intentionally injured, intimidated and interfered with B.L.” because the latter “was and had been providing reproductive health services.”
According to the second count in the indictment, Houck “verbally confronted B.L. and forcefully shoved B.L. to the ground in front of the PPC, causing injuries to B.L. that required medical attention.”
The nature of the medical attention was not explained in the available court records or in the DOJ press release.
The DOJ said that Houck could face “up to a maximum of 11 years in prison, three years of supervised release, and fines of up to $350,000” if he is convicted of the alleged offenses.
The FBI has turned into Biden’s secret police force. Sending a small army of heavily armed agents to raid Mark Houck’s home should frighten EVERY American. The FBI using fear & intimidation tactics to go after conservatives needs to END!!
— Ronny Jackson (@RonnyJacksonTX) September 24, 2022
Free Press International
[Freedom Is Not Free!]
