A Vatican reporter last week said John Paul was the perfect pope for the television age, "a man of images." Think of the pictures of him storm-tossed, tempest-tossed, standing somewhere and leaning into a heavy wind, his robes whipping behind him, holding on to his crosier, the staff bearing the image of a crucified Christ, with both hands, for dear life, as if consciously giving Christians a picture of what it is to be alive.

Benedict, the reporter noted, is the perfect pope for the Internet age. He is a man of the word. You download the text of what he said, print it, ponder it.

Now Benedict comes to America, his first trip as pope. The highlight in the Vatican's eyes is his address to the United Nations. No one knows what he will say. He will no doubt call for peace, for that is what popes do, and should do. Beyond that? Perhaps some variation on themes from his famous Regensburg address, in September 2006.

There he traced and limned some of the development of Christianity, but he turned first to Islam. Faith in God does not justify violence, he said. "The right use of reason" prompts us to understand that violence is incompatible with the nature of God, and the nature, therefore, of the soul. God, he quotes an ancient Byzantine ruler, "is not pleased by blood," and "not acting reasonably is contrary to God's nature." More: "To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm." This is a message for our time, and a courageous one, too. (The speech was followed by riots and by Osama bin Laden's charge that the pope was starting a new "crusade.")

To be constitutional, even a limited content-neutral no-picketing zone must be defined with sufficient precision. A Kansas funeral-picketing law, for instance, was struck down in 1995 because it banned picketing "before" and "after" funerals without defining those terms. (It has since been reenacted with more precise terms and struck down again.)

I'm not sure what legislatures should do about funeral picketing. I strongly sympathize with the desire to shield the grieving, especially given how cruel and contemptible many of the funeral picketers have been; I also think little would be lost to public debate if funeral picketing is banned. On the other hand, I do worry about the slippery-slope risks from any new exception to free-speech principles. In any case, though, I've tried to explain what First Amendment law is now, whether or not that's the way it should be.