Cal Zastrow couldn’t spend Christmas with his wife and family. He didn’t miss a flight, he wasn’t away travelling for work and he wasn’t sick in the hospital.
Instead, Cal missed only the 2nd Thanksgiving ever with his wife Trish in 41 years because Joe Biden put him in federal prison for protesting abortion. He was one of over a dozen pro-life Americas subjected to a bogus federal law called FACE that the Biden tea, exploited to put them in prison for merely expressing their First Amendment protest rights.
But Zastrow tells Daily Wire he’s using the time in prison to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
“I’m all on fire for Jesus,” he said. “I’m doing absolutely great, I’m on a big mission trip here.”
Over one month into his prison sentence, Zastrow said he has kept busy praying, reading his Bible, and teaching his fellow inmates about Christianity.
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“There’s a whole lot of prodigals who are wallowing in pig mud, but they want to come back to Jesus, and so I’m here as a missionary to pull them out of that and help them get back on the Jesus road,” he said.
He said his friends and family have sent him over 50 books, mostly about Christian missionaries, and he has turned his cell into a sort of library. Zastrow said he’s been giving away a lot of copies in English and Spanish of the book “Tortured for Christ,” which is about Richard Wurmbrand, a pastor who spent years in a communist prison in Romania.
Zastrow said he has mixed feelings about the propsect of President Donald Trump pardoning him.
“I’m not getting my hopes up too high,” he said. “Plus I’m busy here. I’m busy. This prison holds almost 2,300 men and their need to hear about Jesus, their need for that is greater than my need for liberty. And so I’m here on a DOJ-sponsored mission trip.”
He said that most of the guards in the prison were unpleasant and would frequently “bark” and “scream” at the prisoners. “They can’t touch my joy, they can’t touch my soul, they can’t touch my attitude,” he said.
The FACE Act prohibits use of force, obstruction, or property damage intended to interfere with “reproductive health care services.” Though it theoretically protects houses of worship and pro-life pregnancy resource centers as well as abortion clinics, the Biden administration’s Justice Department has largely used the FACE Act to prosecute pro-life activists.
Kristen Clarke, the head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, heads up enforcement of the FACE Act. Following a report from The Daily Signal in April, Clarke recently admitted that she hid the fact that she had been arrested and her arrest’s subsequent expungement from her record from investigators when she was confirmed by the U.S. Senate to her Justice Department post.
The president’s critics have accused the Biden-Harris administration and the DOJ of weaponizing the FACE Act against pro-lifers while failing to charge pro-abortion criminals for the hundreds of attacks on pro-life pregnancy resource centers since the May 2022 leak of the draft Supreme Court opinion indicating Roe v. Wade would soon be overturned.
Some critics, among them Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, have called for the repeal of the FACE Act, arguing that it serves no purpose but to target pro-life activists.
“The Biden administration is using the FACE Act to give pro-life activists and senior citizens lengthy prison terms for nonviolent offenses and protests—all while turning a blind eye to the violence, arson, and riots conducted on behalf of ‘approved’ leftist causes,” Lee told The Daily Signal in May, when a number of pro-life activists were sentenced to prison time.
“Unequal enforcement of the law is a violation of the law,” Lee added at the time, “and men and women who try to expose the horrors of abortion are being unjustly persecuted for their motivations.”
A Nashville jury convicted six pro-life activists involved in the blockade — Gallagher, Idoni, Coleman Boyd, Cal Zastrow, Paul Vaughn and Dennis Green — in January. Four more pro-life activists— Edl, Eva Zastrow, James Zastrow, and Paul Place — were convicted in April.
