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 fully agree with your comment. That said:
Lee County Sheriff Jay Jones said that deputies who tried to pull Copeland over for a welfare check witnessed Copeland step out of his car and shoot himself.
Why are we taking the word of the cops for what happened? We know the right-wingers don’t distinguish between cross-dressers and pedophiles. We know that some of them find great satisfaction in abusing, torturing and even killing those that they consider “other”. And we know that cops cover for other cops.
Yes, it’s entirely possible and plausible that this guy killed himself, but why are we just blindly accepting the cops’ version of events here?
I more or less trust the cops in this case. There’s really no reason to say he killed himself if they killed him, and in doing so create a whole bunch of evidence to cover up. They could just as easily say he was armed and they were scared so they shot him. That’s enough for them to get away with murder, so why would they put themselves in a position that could be proven as a lie later?
Never take a cops words at face value, but also recognize they can freely murder if they want to, so if they aren’t taking credit for a kill, especially someone armed, they probably didn’t do it.
We’re taking the cops word because this was the damned mayor, not some random person (or minority) they pulled over, fucked up and decided they could hide it.
Counterpoint: it’s the mayor of a small town in Alabama. The same Alabama that locked the new mayor out of City Hall because the mayor was Black, and they’d simply been passing the mayorship down through generations without actually bothering to hold elections or anything. Alabama is all sorts of fucked up, and their state motto is “Thank God for Mississippi”.
Being mayor of a small town doesn’t buy you much with the police. The mayor of a small town near where I grew up got swatted by police after someone sent weed to his address that the police were following. The mayor had nothing to do with the weed they just happened to pick his house. The cops didn’t even check who lived at the address and shot the family’s two golden retrievers.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berwyn_Heights,_Maryland_mayor's_residence_drug_raid
This is ridiculous. You’re assuming
1 That because they are officers, they are republican.
They may be, but that’s one assumption.
2 That they are the kind of republican who equates cross dressing with pedophilia.
Happens, but it is another assumption.
3 They would act on that belief with murder. Of an elected official, on duty, on a welfare check.
Sure … could happen. But you see why this is becoming less rational as we go right.
Yes, it’s entirely possible that they killed someone because they cross dressed, but we just blindly accept this random comments version of events here?
Honestly? Yes, I’m assuming there’s a decent chance that they’re bigots. And that’s mostly because they’re (1) small-town (2) cops in (3) Alabama. I’m not saying that this is what did happen, but I am saying that we just shouldn’t take their word for what happened either.
Also? In absolutely no part of my comment did I ever use the word “Republican”.
blindly accept this random comments version of events here?
Pretty sure that’s exactly the opposite of that comments intent. They’re providing another unfortunately likely possibility to encourage us to question the version of events that we’re being told by the cops.
We shouldn’t just immediately believe either scenario is 100% true. But maybe we can ask for body cam footage to confirm the cops version of events
Conservatism Kills.
Literally. Abortion bans increase maternal deaths, and a report by the ADL found that right-wing extremists are responsible for 75% of politically motivated deaths, compared to only 4% by left-wingers.
A review of the research on the ideological basis of political violence explains why conservatism is more deadly:
Whereas most terrorist attacks result in zero fatalities, casualties associated with attacks vary across instances. It is thus possible to examine whether followers of certain ideologies are more likely to use fatal violence, relative to, for instance, property or infrastructure crimes that do not cause deaths. Ideologies that more capably address individuals’ needs should be more ‘successful’ at causing fatalities. Past research specifically suggests two candidate ideologies that are likely to be effective: ideologies on the political right (versus left) and religious (versus secular) ideologies. Analyses of terrorist attacks committed between 1998 and 2005 revealed that organizations subscribing to religious ideologies were the most likely to engage in lethal attacks and were responsible for a greater number of deaths. ‘Leftist’ groups were significantly less likely to kill than religious groups, and anarchist groups were the least likely to engage in lethal attacks. Eco-terrorists were responsible for zero lethal attacks during this period, so they were excluded from analyses. Religious ideology has also been found to increase the lethality of suicide attacks, whereas attacks perpetrated in US regions known for propagating a ‘culture of honor’ were more deadly than attacks perpetrated in other regions.
Why might this be the case? Conservatives are more likely to see the world in absolutist, dogmatic, and closure affording ways than are liberals. Conservatives are also more likely than liberals to moralize values that effectively promote violence. Conservatives value loyalty, authority, and sanctity. This is important, as research has further found that the sacralization of loyalty was positively related (whereas the sacralization of other values was either unrelated or negatively related) to the justification of violence. This suggests that conservative ideologies should have an easier time moralizing political violence than liberal ideologies.
Religious ideologies are similarly suited to addressing the previously outlined needs. Religious ideologies can provide greater certainty than secular ideologies because they rest on the authority of God. In addition, through the promise of a blessed afterlife to those who act as prescribed by the ideology, religion offers a potent avenue to significance that is unavailable to secular ideologies. Religion can more naturally moralize political values, as interpretations of Holy Scripture can convincingly link violent means to religious values and provide convincing rationale for acting on behalf of those injunctions. Furthermore, because religious ideologies cannot be directly verified, people are more reliant on social validation to demonstrate the correctness of their beliefs. Consequently, religious individuals tend to be collectivistic and are more prone to derogate and act with hostility toward adherents of other ideologies. Finally, religious fundamentalism—the form that religious ideology is likely to take among extremists—is positively related to the need for cognitive closure that foments group-centrism, and this relationship partially explains the derogation of outgroup members.
This, in a nutshell, why people become conservative. Because shame and a toxic community keep them from being who they really want to be. Because they need to belong to something so badly that they’ll even join a gang of bigots rather than admit they’re actually the target of that bigotry.
“The party of personal freedoms”
Conservative blog 1819 must be very proud of themselves.
Edit: I just emailed them asking which Republican they plan on killing next. Will let you all know if I get a reply.
Poor guy. This is sad. I hate hearing stories like this
I wouldn’t feel as bad if he was a raging bigot about lgbtq issues, but apparently he didn’t have much to say about that which is pretty impressive for a BAPTIST PREACHER IN ALABAMA.
Yeah, he obviously dealt with a lot of cognitive dissonance between his experience and the culture he was raised in. He wasn’t some hypocrite who was preaching ‘family values’ or some other nonsense, just a tortured soul driven over the edge.
The world just lost another potential ally. He could have helped shape the discourse in his town for the better, but instead he’s being buried. This is a sad day.
poor poor racist republican, joined the republican party to hold down women, and minorities, didn’t wanna get into the whole the leopards that eat faces party that i joined might eat my face should they find out i like wearing women’s clothing, here, let me just defund another domestic violence shelter, nope, i’ll be just fine
Actually, I looked more into his history and you know what I found? They (using neutral pronouns because there’s confusion about whether or not they were actually trans or just cross-dressing) seemed to actually be a pretty cool person. They were very supportive of their trans sisters online and generally encouraging to them.
To be honest, that really isn’t all that surprising. The smaller the town, the less likely it is for local party politics mirror state or federal politics. Normally this means small town politics tend to swing hard-right and either radical libertarian or authoritarian, but it sounds like in this case they probably wanted to be more supportive and inclusive and was possibly being held back by locals. The reality of it is that they were probably Republican because it was the only way to get elected, not because they agreed with the Republican party. Let’s be honest here as well, does it really make sense that someone would be supportive of trans people and then turn around and demonize them?
Sometimes the only way you can make a difference is to walk through the leopards’ cage and hope you don’t get eaten before you reach the other side.
Finally, I’m not even fully convinced that they did kill themselves. Personally, I’ll be waiting to see if any bodycam footage shows up. Small town cops only side with the mayor when they want something done, or when the mayor is actively supporting them, otherwise the mayor is just as much an enemy to them as anyone else.
Edit: it’s also possible that they were a Republican before discovering their love for cross-dressing or desire to be trans, and they were stuck between a rock and a hard place. Because they were in a conservative area, it’s entirely possible they were afraid for their life and or were so heavily indoctrinated by Republicans that they believed that they were the problem, not the party (though the latter doesn’t explain why they were supportive of trans folk online); and considering they supposedly committed suicide in front of cops with no witnesses, it’s entirely possible they were killed by cops and therefore justified in their fear. It’s easy to forget or underestimate just how dangerous it is to be trans in America, especially if you’re from a more liberal city.
If you join fascist organisation, you’re a fucking asshole and there’s absolutely no excuse. Defending these people just makes you an asshole too.
