A small-town Alabama pastor and mayor killed himself Friday, days after a local conservative news website published a story that included photos of him wearing women’s clothing and makeup.
F.L. “Bubba” Copeland, who was the mayor of Smiths Station and the pastor at First Baptist Church in Phenix City, shot himself in front of police during a welfare check, the Lee County Sheriff’s Office said.
Copeland’s private life was exposed Wednesday by the conservative blog 1819 News, which was once owned by the right-wing Alabama Policy Institute and whose top editor is a former Breitbart News contributor.
I already said it once and I’ll say it again. Sometimes the only way to make the world a better place is to walk through the leopards cage and hope they don’t eat you before you come out the other side. The alternative is to kill all the leopards.
You wanna be the one who picks up a gun and starts killing the leopards? No? Then shut the fuck up while the adults try solutions that don’t involve bloodshed. If you start killing the leopards then a hell of a lot of people will die due to retaliation and most of them will be innocent. Get off the internet and go touch grass.
Now, I don’t know what this guy’s politics were like except that they were regularly supportive of their trans sisters online, where they had the freedom to be who they wanted to be because they weren’t being supressed by local conservatives. That tells me that this guy wasn’t completely rotten like many Republicans are.
But hey, go off I guess. Paint with a broad brush and ignore the bumps that don’t conform to your expectations, 'cause every time humans have done that it’s always lead to the betterment of humanity, right?
This person didn’t “walk through the leopards cage” lmfao are u high?
Let’s get a few things straight.
This was not a repressed hero.
This person was not brave.
This person was a coward.
This person was self hating.
This person joined a political party voluntarily …they didn’t have to be in politics.
The party they joined is one who’s official positions demonize LGBTQ peoples.
The leopards in this case killed themselves.
Being supportive of trans people online while shitting on them irl is the height of not only hypocrisy but classic conservative rules for thee but not for me.
Delete your ignorant ass post.
I thought it was established that they didn’t talk shit about people in public. Did I miss something?
No. You’re seeing people who only see the world in black-and-white or us-vs-them. It’s extremely unsettling for people, like myself, who rely on people like that for support. It’s why it is that if you hang out in LGBT spaces - especially for people who are trans, enby and/or a-spec (asexual, aromantic and/or agender) - you’ll see memes about false allies; people who claim to be allies, but only because your political views align with their own. Because if your own views or philosophies don’t align with theirs then they’ll drop you like a rock.
Again, I haven’t looked deeply into the mayor’s prior political views, I’ve mainly looked through articles covering their death, so it’s totally possible that they themselves held bigoted views. Nor have I been able to figure out if they held office before they started expressing themselves online (it looks like they deleted their accounts before they died), because it’s totally possible they held office before discovering themselves and didn’t know how to get out of their position (inb4 “just move lul” or “just swap political parties, lul ecks dee”; if the former were that easy I wouldn’t still be stuck in Texas, and the latter is a great way to get yourself killed in our current political climate). However, to effectively say they deserved it for being trans and republican while stopping just short of saying such, really reeks of disgusting false-ally bullshit.
Edit: actually, after looking through some of their posts, at best they’re just shit-stirrers, at worst they’re just hateful, angry, and taking it out on everyone else.
How is that relevant. They were actively participating in a political party that is trying to oppress trans people. Nothing else here is relevant.
This is my point. Being LGBTQ doesn’t give this guy a pass. Others seem to think it does.
There are tons of gay and trans Republicans.
They are just as shitty as the straight ones.
This is the key takeaway from this whole thing. This guy would rather kill himself than be seen as part of the LGBT community. A community which their own experiences told them would be welcoming and understanding and would have been.
They could have been welcomed with open arms and they could have rejected republicanism and conservatism. Instead at the very end they made their choice to literally end their life instead of being known as part of the LGBT community.
This was an easy choice for this guy. There was no grey area. I’m not sure why other people are pretending there was. No one forced him. Hell in a month no one would have given a shit.
When Republicans start coming for the trans kids like they did with the gay kids…how are you going to tell the difference between the ones holding bats cuz of peer pressure or cuz they want to?
