One Tory MP is quoted on Sunday as saying Mrs T would never have treated the activists this way, and he's right.
In 2006, he rallied grass-roots organizers around China to go on a hunger strike to protest the way security forces treated another activist.
Jagielski blustered: "How could anybody ever treat the activists gathered here in such a manner".
This certainly suggests cynicism, but also shows that the White House treats Christian activists like any other pressure group to be stroked, but not bowed down to.
This grounding in such a male-dominated environment stood me in good stead for my later involvement in the trade union movement, where even today there are plenty of men who continue to treat women activists with a level of tokenism that would have incensed our suffragist foremothers.
I pressed Paul on how he would treat information activists.
"For far too long, we have treated members and activists like cogs in a machine, to be contacted during elections.
Until recently, abortion rights activists treated stories like these as harbingers of the future if states continued to erode abortion rights.
To that end, Thursday's hearing is being treated by some activists as a combination of election night and Super Bowl.
Since then opposition demonstrations have regularly been broken up roughly and opposition activists treated nastily; but the worst that happens is broken bones, not fatalities.
