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Pro-life and Christian groups also see the decision as a major landmark in the anti-abortion cause.

"Pro-Life activists are not mobsters," said Sandy Rios, president of Concerned Women for America. "The Supreme Court has set the record straight on the time-honored American tradition of the right to protest."

"The court's ruling should help thwart the abortion industry's efforts to silence and punish the free speech and loving outreach of Christian men and women," said James Dobson, president of Focus on the Family. "This decision will help ensure that women with crisis pregnancies will hear the pro-life message."

Scheidler told the press yesterday that unlike some approaches in the past, the pro-life message will now be peaceful and "mostly be prayer vigils and counseling."

Fred Rogers, 74, died this morning
Fred Rogers, a Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) minister known to millions as Mister Rogers, passed away early today from stomach cancer. The former host of PBS's "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" learned he had cancer in January.

Rogers started in children's programming in the 1950s. PBS picked up his show in 1968. It became PBS's longest running series. The last original episode was filmed in 2001. Reruns of the show continue to run.

During his career, Rogers received two Peabody Awards, four Emmys, a "Lifetime Achievement" Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, and the nation's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The websites for "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" and its production company, Family Communications, today offer remembrances of Fred Rogers in addition to guides for helping children cope with the news.

In a 2000 Christianity Today cover story, Wendy Murray Zoba wrote that Rogers was ordained as "an evangelist to work with children and families through the mass media." He did not evangelize on the program nor did he write religious themes into the shows. But what he did, Zoba wrote, was create a neighborhood where children were loved and these "daily neighborhood visits sow[ed] seeds that awaken something basic in their hearts."

"Every time I walk into the studio, I say to myself [as a prayer], 'Let some word that is heard be Yours,'" Rogers said in that interview. "The Holy Spirit translates our best efforts into what needs to be communicated to that person in his or her place of need."

Zoba asked Rogers if his neighborhood was a metaphor for heaven. He said that it wasn't because the show often tackled hard issues like death and divorce.

"When I think about heaven, it is a state in which we are so greatly loved that there is no fear and doubt and disillusionment and anxiety," Rogers said. "It is where people really do look at you with those eyes of Jesus."

Mixing traditional culture and Christianity:

• Churches try to protect Hawaii's native tongue | Many Hawaiians do not speak the language they come to hear at church services, but they still consider the ritual an expression of their culture (The New York Times)
  
  
• Potlatch ceremony an opportunity to honor differences | Catholics, Presbyterians, Tlingit tribe come together (Seattle Times)
  
  
• Earlier: Potlatch Gospel | Alaskan churches debate whether they should reach at-risk youth by using their culture's pre-Christian traditions (Christianity Today, June 15, 2000)

Life ethics:

• Russians feel abortion's complications | Used as birth control in Soviet times, practice has led to widespread infertility (The Washington Post)
  
  

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February (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47