Fred Phelps

Three months after her son was gunned down in a burst of campus violence that shocked the nation, Mari Gordon-Rayborn accepted his diploma Thursday in a graduation ceremony marked with tears. Dressed in a purple cap and gown at Santana High School, Gordon-Rayborn received a standing ovation when her son Randy's name was read and she was handed his diploma by principal Karen Degischer.

Re "Christian baiting," Opinion, April 1 Jonah Goldberg is way off the mark. The Darwin fish is not necessarily smug Christian baiting by secular progressives. This little fish -- far from being a mockery -- is also used by Christians who have evolved their beliefs to accept God-given advances in science, rather than buy into every literal word in the Bible. "Smug" is the righteous fundamentalist self-knowledge that two centuries of Darwin and modern archaeology should be dismissed for words penned by semiliterate, nomadic Hebrew tribesmen.

If Elton John is pinball's wizard, Michael Brown is its queen. A gay 36-year-old artist from San Francisco, Brown is the creator of Go Girl!, a pinball machine with a homosexual theme. The winner of the custom game competition at the Pinball Fantasy '97 convention in Las Vegas last weekend, Brown has given pinball a face lift with his use of wigs, makeup and campy commentary. To begin the game, one must step into Brown's shoes--a pair of red metal stilettos welded to the machine's platform.

It's hard to imagine a more despicable message than the notion that U.S. combat deaths in Iraq are God's just punishment for America's tolerance of gays and lesbians. But that is precisely why a Kansas church preaching that demented doctrine must receive the protection of the 1st Amendment. Those on society's margins -- and sometimes its weirdos -- are those whose speech needs protecting.

Matthew Shepard died an unimaginably horrific death, lashed to a wooden fence in the lonely Wyoming countryside, beaten until he fell into coma and then abandoned. Yet five years after his October 1998 murder, the red-hot homophobia that fueled the college freshman's killers has flared up again in Wyoming, where outside extremists who call themselves Christians continue to flog Shepard in death. The Rev. Fred Phelps, a Topeka, Kan.

Trying to stage "The Laramie Project," a documentary play about the murder of gay college student Matthew Shepard, turned into a saga of its own for the drama students of Burbank's John Burroughs High School when their principal banned the production and they went ahead with it anyway in an off-campus venue. Nicole Carothers, a Burroughs senior, says she proposed the show last fall as a joint effort of the drama class and the school's Gay Straight Alliance.

It was opening night and the 46 students who make up the cast and crew of Corona del Mar High School's production of "Rent: School Edition" were scrambling through a hallway that doubles as a backstage for the school's tiny student theater. Hannah Lindt, 18, made last-minute tweaks Thursday to the costumes she spent months searching for at thrift stores, tearing apart and tailoring to fit just so.

One of the best things about your coverage of the scandals of Paul and Jan Crouch and their Trinity Broadcasting Network ("Pastor's Empire Built on Acts of Faith, and Cash," Sept. 19) is that it provides me some relief from reading about the scandals of my own Catholic Church. Donald A. Bentley La Puente I thought Crouch was an expert on the Bible. What about the Lord's words: "You cannot serve both God and money" (Matthew 6:24), or "Sell all you have and give it to the poor" (Luke 18:22)

The word "vile" is inadequate to describe what members of the Westboro Baptist Church, a fringe group obsessed with homosexuality, did on the day of the memorial service for Marine Lance Corp. Matthew A. Snyder, who was killed in Iraq in 2006. The question for the Supreme Court is whether their despicable conduct is protected by the 1st Amendment -- and the answer is yes. That day, Westboro's pastor, Fred Phelps, and six relatives staged a protest near the church where services were held, though they remained at a distance.