{"id":23742,"date":"2014-08-05T08:07:11","date_gmt":"2014-08-05T12:07:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?p=23742"},"modified":"2014-08-05T02:12:03","modified_gmt":"2014-08-05T06:12:03","slug":"just-when-it-all-seemed-better","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2014\/08\/05\/just-when-it-all-seemed-better\/","title":{"rendered":"Just when it all seemed better"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u2022 Bendable, poseable, and, of course, white<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u2022 David Horowitz<\/a> says \u201cballs\u201d are a virtue and women are \u201cbitches.\u201d He seems nice. If Mark Driscoll hadn\u2019t fessed up, I\u2019d suspect that it was Horowitz who wrote all those \u201cWilliam Wallace II\u201d posts<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Bendable\"<\/a>\u2022 Sarah Pulliam Bailey has an interesting article on gay Christians who choose to be celibate<\/a>. That\u2019s a fine choice if it\u2019s freely chosen, but, alas, many of the folks in Bailey\u2019s piece don\u2019t see this as a choice, but as something compulsory for themselves and \u2014 even worse \u2014 for everybody else. After all, as the Apostle Paul said, we\u2019re all slaves to the law.<\/p>\n

\u2022 In 2006, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia made like Pontius Pilate, defending the death penalty by saying there has not been \u201ca single case \u2014 not one \u2014 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\u2019s name would be shouted from the rooftops.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

By that point we\u2019d been on the rooftops for two years, shouting the name of Cameron Todd Willingham<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u2022 \u201cSort of like two very, very different groups of people<\/a> having parties within ear shot of each other<\/a>.\u201d It\u2019s a window into two Americas \u2014 only one of which is funny and not evil. (Background here<\/a>.)<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2022 Feminists always seem to be upset by stories like this<\/a>. \u201cPro-lifers\u201d rarely do. That\u2019s \u2026 interesting<\/em>, isn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n

\u2022 \u201cA linguistics professor walks into a bar<\/a> \u2026\u201d (Every<\/em> discipline and profession should be doing this: botanists and biblical scholars, horticulturalists and helioseismologists,\u00a0epistemologists and epidemiologists, evangelists and ecdysiasts. \u2026 Or light bulb jokes, those would be fine too.)<\/p>\n

\u2022 The story of Monseigneur Bienvenu<\/a> in Victor Hugo\u2019s Les Miserables<\/em> always makes me cry:<\/p>\n

\u201cAh! here you are!\u201d he exclaimed, looking at Jean Valjean. \u201cI 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?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This story from the First Baptist Church of Royal Palm Beach<\/a>, Florida, makes me want to cry too, but for different reasons. What\u2019s the difference between Hugo\u2019s merciful bishop and Florida\u2019s merciless church? Hugo\u2019s bishop is fictional<\/em>. Bendable, poseable, and white indeed.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some Tuesday morning linkage, including: Horowitz is William Wallace II too; slaves to the law; Scalia still deaf to those shouts from the rooftops; #WarOnWhites a window into two Americas; we need more specialists to walk into bars; a merciful bishop and an unmerciful church.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nJust when it all seemed better<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Some Tuesday morning linkage, including: Horowitz is William Wallace II too; slaves to the law; Scalia still deaf to those shouts from the rooftops; #WarOnWhites a window into two Americas; we need more specialists to walk into bars; a merciful bishop and an unmerciful church.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2014\/08\/05\/just-when-it-all-seemed-better\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Just when it all seemed better\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Some Tuesday morning linkage, including: Horowitz is William Wallace II too; 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/141"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23742"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23742\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}