Just when it all seemed better

• Bendable, poseable, and, of course, white.

• David Horowitz says “balls” are a virtue and women are “bitches.” He seems nice. If Mark Driscoll hadn’t fessed up, I’d suspect that it was Horowitz who wrote all those “William Wallace II” posts.

• Sarah Pulliam Bailey has an interesting article on gay Christians who choose to be celibate. That’s a fine choice if it’s freely chosen, but, alas, many of the folks in Bailey’s piece don’t see this as a choice, but as something compulsory for themselves and — even worse — for everybody else. After all, as the Apostle Paul said, we’re all slaves to the law.

• In 2006, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia made like Pontius Pilate, defending the death penalty by saying there has not been “a single case — not one — in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit. If such an event had occurred in recent years, we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent’s name would be shouted from the rooftops.”

By that point we’d been on the rooftops for two years, shouting the name of Cameron Todd Willingham.

The state of Texas killed Cameron Todd Willingham in 2004. There exists no evidence that Willingham is guilty of the crime for which he was executed. There exists no evidence that there was a crime.

• “Sort of like two very, very different groups of people having parties within ear shot of each other.” It’s a window into two Americas — only one of which is funny and not evil. (Background here.)

• Feminists always seem to be upset by stories like this. “Pro-lifers” rarely do. That’s … interesting, isn’t it?

• “A linguistics professor walks into a bar …” (Every discipline and profession should be doing this: botanists and biblical scholars, horticulturalists and helioseismologists, epistemologists and epidemiologists, evangelists and ecdysiasts. … Or light bulb jokes, those would be fine too.)

• The story of Monseigneur Bienvenu in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables always makes me cry:

“Ah! here you are!” he exclaimed, looking at Jean Valjean. “I am glad to see you. Well, but how is this? I gave you the candlesticks too, which are of silver like the rest, and for which you can certainly get two hundred francs. Why did you not carry them away with your forks and spoons?”

This story from the First Baptist Church of Royal Palm Beach, Florida, makes me want to cry too, but for different reasons. What’s the difference between Hugo’s merciful bishop and Florida’s merciless church? Hugo’s bishop is fictional. Bendable, poseable, and white indeed.