Darn. This was strangely topical. Today we took some kids to visit the nursery children here, and while I was there a little white girl asked me to get her a doll from the cupboard. I said, ‘there is a doll there, look, by the chair’ (it was a black doll, one of the natural featured and haired ones) but she screwed her face up and said, ‘I don’t like THAT one’. I asked her why not, but she just shook her head. Then I come across this post of yours.
 
I suggested on the site that, maybe the preference merely reflected the commonality of what the kids see around them (not knowing the ethnic percentage make up where the film was made), and had nothing to do with black and white being ‘better’ or whatever. I wanted to make this assessment first. Then I watched the film, and that was hard, then when it came to the doll experiment part, it made me tear up – its so damn sad. The children’s responses made specific reference to ‘the nicest’ because ‘it’s white’ and so on. I’m not sure how to respond now, but I don’t think now that my initial perhaps over hopeful idea is right. Something insidious is going on.

And why only baby boys? Don’t lesbians sin too? Why am I bothering to even consider this?

Our Gelert, when he is sound up thus, is indeed a force of nature.
 
It’s interesting that these people are willing to interfere with life in the womb to correct what they think is nature’s mistake, but are wholesale against interfering with life in the womb in the form of abortion.  Clearly they are not bright enough to appreciate their own paradox.  I may write to them too, simply because stupid people annoy me and they’ve annoyed my Wednesday morning.

Coboró, Mohler indeed hits the right note in his comments about Coulter. But it seems to me to be simply an extension of his "hate the sin, but not the sinner" view of gays. And that’s a sentiment that I’ve always found rather insidious. It allows, as we’ve seen, him to move to the blithe pronouncement that only heterosexuality is right, and homosexuals should be "cured". It’s basically the "homosexuality is icky and it makes the baby Jesus cry" view of the world. It’s a view that would deny my being if it could.

How very interesting.  Is God a King Charles Spandrel, or a Cocker Spandrel?
 
The New York Times has free registration except for the Times Select sections denoted by the orange gothic T icon, which will cost you.  Rather annoying as it hides all its columnists behind the charge and I love Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich.  I try to pick them up in the International Herald Tribune hard copy the next day.

I agree about the box – it’s fine with a pencil, cos if there’s some trick and its gets mashed, so what. Your driving license now – you want to be able to get home right, and if there’s some trick or magician’s tactic, no license. It’s suspicion I agree. Not a good experiment.
 
Of course, you know there is a third posibility here?

Bloody hell, I’d like to see just one of them try that crap on my mother!