Protest

Anti-abortion activists staged a 90-minute demonstration on Old York Road near Abington Memorial Hospital yesterday to protest the hospital's abortion services. Demonstrators, carrying signs that read "Abortion Kills Children," stretched out for eight blocks on the east side of the hospital but made no attempt to block patients or traffic. Group spokesman George Tomezsko said 1,000 people from the Pro-Life Coalition and the Christian Action Council had been expected to join the protest, but he estimated that 600 participated.

When the Ku Klux Klan holds a rally in Lancaster County tomorrow night, local residents will be ready. As many as 1,000 people are expected to gather in Lancaster to protest the Klan, while several hundred more have planned an anti-KKK rally in Ephrata, where the white supremacist group will meet. Twenty-eight civic and religious leaders in the area have issued a statement calling on local residents to attend the rallies to protest "the appalling presence of the Ku Klux Klan in Lancaster County.

The Oscar-night protest planned by the Rev. Jesse Jackson over the lack of movie industry executives who are minorities has received support from some filmmakers and city officials, but has created a debate in the African-American community. Los Angeles City Councilman Nate Holden said he supported Jackson's protest over what he said was institutional racism in the entertainment industry in its portrayal of the lives of African-Americans. "Twenty-five percent of the people who go to movies are black," Holden said Tuesday.

The modern American protest movement is practically invisible in the mass media. Yet, it exists. It has a voice, its voice is growing, and it is deeply rooted in the protest movements of the '60s and '70s. The war cry of the '60s was, "Give Peace a Chance," and the message was "Love is all you need. " These were the seed ideas of a moral vision: to heal society's rupture into rich and poor, war-makers and warred-upon, and to rectify the political and civil injustice of America's economics apartheid.

WASHINGTON - Supreme Court justices seemed troubled and divided Wednesday as they questioned whether a small Kansas church could be punished for mounting a protest that many found contemptible outside a military funeral. The high court did not clearly tip its hand during the hour-long oral arguments in the case pitting the Westboro Baptist Church against a grieving Pennsylvania father. Several justices did, however, hint that the 2006 funeral protest was lawful even if it was obnoxious.

North Philadelphia community activists marched outside District Attorney Ronald D. Castille's East Falls home last night to protest what they called racial injustice in the Sean Daily trial. About 70 protesters, honking horns and waving Puerto Rican flags, drove in a convoy of cars and buses from Norris Square park to Castille's house on Henry Avenue. Once in front of Castille's house, they chanted in both Spanish and English and distributed fliers as curious neighbors, drawn by the noise from a public address system and by the flashing lights of police cars, gathered to watch from nearby street corners.

Officials in Middle Township apologized Wednesday for arresting a radio host and a former mayor who were protesting Saturday outside a public hearing hosted by Gov. Corzine in Cape May County. Corzine was at Middle Township High School in Cape May Court House to promote his plan to raise highway tolls to pay down state debt. Former Bogota Mayor Steve Lonegan of Bergen County and lawyer and radio personality Seth Grossman of Somers Point handed out leaflets and carried protest signs outside the school.

TOURING Historic Philadelphia recently, I saw a group gathering at the Liberty Bell and moving toward the Constitution Center. Standing between a crisp First Amendment plaque and "We the People" mural, the group waved signs, chanted and yelled at cars driving by. With the building where our forefathers drafted this constitution right behind them, I couldn't help but feel the whole thing was a bit ironic. They were protesting our new president. With clever signs like "No-Bama" and "Broke-Bama," the group was denouncing the Recovery Act and new stimulus plans.

About 75 people marched from City Hall to the Gallery shopping mall at midday yesterday to protest the training of Central American contras in the United States, while 50 others demonstrated at McGuire Air Force Base in Wrightstown. They were part of a series of protests at Air Force bases across the country, said Cate Woods of Trenton, an organizer with the Pledge of Resistance, a national organization that supports non-violent resistance to U.S. military action against the Nicaraguan government.

Engines were cold but tempers were hot at Philadelphia International Airport yesterday as disgruntled taxi drivers sat idle in the sun to protest a dispatching system that they call unfair and corrupt. From noon to 6 p.m., more than 100 drivers milled around and quarreled loudly in the outdoor cab holding area near Terminal B and insisted that they would not take fares until they received a guarantee of an immediate meeting with officials from the city Aviation Department. The protest, staged by a new organization of drivers called the International Association of Taxi Drivers and Owners, was marked by loud quarrels with Aviation Department officials, but no violence.