Down at the little church they all wear hats

• Brewer comes through in Arizona.

Oops, wrong Brewer in that photo. That’s actually “Hank,” the stray Bichon adopted by the Milwaukee Brewers at their spring training camp in Phoenix.

But the more important news involving a Brewer in Arizona is that Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed the anti-gay bill passed by the state legislature. In a replay of what happened in Kansas, the bill’s initial enthusiastic support among Republicans turned quickly to remorse as they began to realize what this proposal actually said and how destructive it would have been for rights, religion and business in Arizona.

More on that later.

• A federal judge says Texas’ ban of same-sex marriage is illegal. “Without a rational relation to a legitimate governmental purpose, state-imposed inequality can find no refuge in our U.S. Constitution,” U.S. District Judge Orlando Garcia wrote.

Garcia’s ruling is stayed pending appeal, so anti-gay Texans now have a window of opportunity to defend the law by coming up with some “rational relation to a legitimate governmental purpose.” Nobody has yet managed to find one.

• News you can use: “74,476 Reasons You Should Always Get the Bigger Pizza” by Quoctrung Bui. “The math of why bigger pizzas are such a good deal is simple: A pizza is a circle, and the area of a circle increases with the square of the radius. So, for example, a 16-inch pizza is actually four times as big as an 8-inch pizza.”

Bui created an interactive graph that calculates the cost-per-square-inch based on price data from 3,678 pizza places. This really needs to be turned into a smartphone app. It’s also a great answer for every high school math teacher confronting students’ question: When are we ever gonna use this stuff?

• “Temporary Work, Lasting Harm,” ProPublica

The lightly regulated blue-collar temp world is one where workers are often sent to do dangerous jobs with little or no training. Where the company overseeing the work isn’t required to pay the medical bills if temps get hurt. And where, when temp workers do get injured on the job, the temp firm and the company fight with each other over who is responsible, sometimes even delaying emergency medical care while they sort it out.

• The awfulness of the acting in evangelistic videos is always directly proportionate to the awfulness of the theology in evangelistic videos. This is true even for voice work. That’s via Jeremy Myers, who rightly says this is horrifying, but not in the way the people who made it intended. That video was posted by somebody named Dave Flang, who seems to be the president of the Hell Fan Club. The guy has a YouTube channel called “Hell’s Playlist,” featuring 64 videos — all of which appear to be based on the same extrabiblical and anti-biblical crap in the video linked above. This isn’t just “error” — it’s an ugly, evil lie being told about God.

• Criminal cases aren’t usually viewed through a partisan lens. A killer on the loose is generally seen, regardless of political ideology, as a Bad Thing. The apprehension of a suspect, his trial and conviction are generally seen, regardless of political ideology, as Good Things.

But this is not always the case. Fox News clearly regards the Florida murder trial of Michael Dunn as a partisan issue. Dunn is their guy — their side. How did that happen? Is there any way, other than the horrible and obvious way, to explain why the conviction of a white man for killing a black teenager should be viewed as some kind of setback for conservatives? Is there any way to view Fox News’ take on this case as anything other than an admission and an embrace of racism as a component of their political ideology? What other explanation can there be for the reflexive insistence that a white man with a gun pointed at black boys must be defended as part of the conservative tribe?

• Catching up on some old reading, I follow William Lindsey to Andrew Sullivan to Neil Young to an apparently influential 1993 screed by Mormon Elder Boyd K. Packer, in which he identifies what he says are the three gravest “dangers” facing his church: “the gay-lesbian movement, the feminist movement (both of which are relatively new), and the ever-present challenge from the so-called scholars or intellectuals.”

Packer was addressing something called the “All-Church Coordinating Council.” I don’t know what that is, but based on the three things he identifies as dangers, I am forced to conclude it is a gathering exclusively composed of uneducated heterosexual males.