Yesterday, Linda and I and our children took a long stroll down distant-memory lane and saw the documentary about Fred Rogers and his neighborhood. Our little group was representative of the entire audience, older people and middle-aged people, the children who had watched Mr. Rogers and the parents who let them.

The documentary had as much to do with why Fred Rogers created the neighborhood as it did the man himself. Rogers was an ordained Presbyterian minister who felt a particular calling to children. He saw the sort of messages children’s shows were delivering—violence, violence disguised as comedy, and violence disguised as human accidents—and determined that those weren’t the messages that children needed to be hearing.

(Our own children watched Mr. Rogers in the morning and the Popeye Club in the afternoon. In the Popeye Club, the hero frequently saved his girlfriend by slugging Bluto.)

 Admittedly, I was a little leery of Mr. Rogers back then. Here was this quiet guy who came through the door singing, immediately took off his coat and put on a sweater. Then he changed shoes and fed the fish. I didn’t watch the program that closely. Now, having seen the movie, I wish I had.

Rogers had one overriding theme that had nothing to do with changing clothes or feeding fish. It was simply this:

Every child deserves to expect and receive love, no matter who that child is.

That would seem to be a wallowing in the obvious, not something to base a number of years of successful children’s shows on. Of course, that wasn’t all that he said. He made pointed statements on current themes, such as the fight over the segregation of public swimming pools, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, and the Challenger explosion. But even as he treated these incidents, there was the lesson he kept teaching: children are loved and will be kept safe by the adults around them.

And a part of that was that children who were different deserved the same thing.

There were several places in the movie where I teared up, but the one that got me the most was when a child paralyzed because of surgery to remove a spinal tumor and confined to a wheel chair was brought to the neighborhood just before he was to have surgery to fuse his spine. His parents knew that the surgery was necessary, but that their son might not make it. Rogers talked calmly with the boy about why he was in a wheel chair and what they were going to do. Then they sang a song together: I like you just the way you are.

That’s when the tears escaped from my eyes and rolled down my cheeks. I think that’s something every child needs to hear.

Earlier this week, Facebook resurrected one of my posts from some years ago. It was an almost-poem entitled “Free Expression.”

Day by day, expectations

wrap themselves ever more tightly

around me until

I’m just a bundle of what everyone else

thinks I should be.

But one day I’ll shed that cocoon of expectation

and be just who I am.

 When I wrote that, I thought that this was about as good as it got, that we’d live long enough and be strong enough to one day shed the expectations of others and be what the psychologists call our “authentic” self. But Mr. Rogers thought differently. He thought that we should accept people as and where they are, rather than imposing our expectations and judgments on them.

I think he was right.

I was thoroughly enjoying the movie until we got about fifteen minutes from the end. Some talking heads, self-proclaimed experts, and generally nasty people started attacking Mr. Rogers and his love-‘em-like-they-are philosophy. One was shown saying that Rogers was contributing to the downfall of the country by trying to convince all children that they were special. Another said that this was the attitude that had created a generation of young adults who felt entitled. Some shrill TV wench was shouting that he was an “evil, evil man.”

And that made me very sad. These people had taken neither the time nor trouble to understand what Rogers were saying, but even worse, they had hijacked his message to fit their narrative. In effect, they were denying that it was our responsibility to love and protect our children, to accept their imperfections and love them still. We’re hearing a lot of that today.

Then there was the final insult.

When Mr. Rogers died, the Westboro Baptist Church demonstrated at his funeral. Not in favor of his example of Christian love and concern for his fellow man, but to disrupt the last service for someone they felt accepted gays.

(If you go to the Westboro Baptist web site, you’ll see their message: God hates fags and other proud sinners.)

But these people, like the haters on TV, had badly missed the point. Fred Rogers did indeed accept and love gay people. One of them testified to that in the movie. But that wasn’t the point.

Fred Rogers accepted everyone just as they are. And just as the Christ he followed did.

The documentary couldn’t have come out at a better time.