A monstrous tragedy of major proportions

F. L. “Bubba” Copeland served as the mayor of Smiths Station, Alabama, and the pastor at First Baptist Church of Phenix City, Alabama (a church affiliated with both the Southern Baptist Convention and Cooperative Baptist Fellowship). He was a 49-year-old married father of three. On November 1st, 1819 News published “The secret life of Smiths Station Mayor and Baptist pastor F. L. ‘Bubba’ Copeland as a ‘transgender curvy girl’,” reporting that Copeland had created an online presence as a transgender female. Initially denying this fact, he eventually admitted to the online presence and explained the “alter ego” as a hobby he had used since his youth to relieve anxiety and stress. Copeland killed himself Friday evening (November 3rd, 2023). This is a sad story on multiple levels. Here are some available resources. Be warned that the initial article includes disturbing facts and some graphic details.

You can follow the sequence of events in the following articles:

• The secret life of Smiths Station Mayor and Baptist pastor F. L. ‘Bubba’ Copeland as a ‘transgender curvy girl’: ‘It’s a hobby I do to relieve stress’
• FBC Phenix City pastor disputes 1819 News article’s allegations
• F. L. Copeland -- prepared statement to his church, Wednesday the 1st (Starts at about 12:30)
• Alabama Baptist state leadership responds to Phenix City pastor allegations
• FBC Phenix City pastor Copeland’s death being reported

A ridiculous and appalling article appeared on Yahoo News, written for The Advocate by Christopher Wiggins. Its design was to spark outrage, which shows up repeatedly in the comments. However, there is disingenuity and fraud present. For example, the author claims “The Advocate honors people’s chosen names and pronouns. Because Copeland did not publicly come out before their death, The Advocate is referring to them as the person they presented publicly.” In fact The Advocate is lying. F. L. Copeland never presented himself publicly as “they” and “them” (his own claim: “It’s private. I don’t do it in the public or anything like that ... It’s just a fictional character I made up to relieve stress.”). They are greasing their own wheels rather than honoring Copeland’s chosen pronouns, as the article fraudulently claims.

Much of the mainstream media has painted this as an ugly “outing” of mean-spirited conservative journalism which caused Copeland to take his own life. Little reflection on what part his own actions, online presence (which is not really private no matter how much one wants to imagine it is), and contradictory “second self” might have played.

What are your thoughts?

Rules for thee

...and not for me.

Excerpts from DeSantis Spokeswoman Reveals How AOC’s Florida Trip Is Something Even Worse Than Hypocrisy.

AOC’s behavior is not hypocrisy — it is HIERARCHY. By openly flouting the same rules that she pushes on her constituents, she is signaling that she is powerful and does not have to abide by the same restrictions as the peasants...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, San Francisco Mayor London Breed, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, have all been among big left-wing names caught publicly breaking the very rules they preach when it comes to the pandemic.

And, of course, there’s President Joe Biden, whose contradictory statements and behavior when it comes to the coronavirus would be the stuff of late-night comedians, if the country had any late-night comedians left who were actually interested in political comedy.

Equality

John Shore is a progressive blogger who advocates the “full and equal” acceptance of LGBT people “within Christianity.” In 2012 he posted an article which I later found and responded to briefly. Though he says “take God at his word,” regarding homosexuality his piece shows a peculiar propensity to shift and shade the Bible when it speaks on that topic, while holding the helm steady when the Bible condemns the kind of behaviour he loves to hate.

He made a point in a way with which I agreed:

“Heterosexual Christians are being unbiblical by using the clobber passages as justification for applying absolute standards of morality to homosexual ‘sins’ that they themselves are not tempted to commit, while at the same time accepting for themselves a standard of relative morality for those sins listed in the clobber passages that they do routinely commit.”[i]

I agree with Shore’s assessment. Often we condemn the sins of others while dismissing our own. It is the height of hypocrisy for heterosexual Christians to condemn homosexual sexual sin while excusing heterosexual sexual sin. This is all too common in some churches. Jesus warns us to think soberly, “…why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”

I do not agree with Shore’s solution. He thinks that condemning homosexuality based on the Bible is “the morally incorrect choice.”  His solution drops biblical standards of morality as they apply to homosexual sins. A consistent application of his approach would mean no sins should be “clobbered” – even those sins he loves to hate. I doubt he would like that end game.

The biblical solution is to turn the word of God loose. Let the Bible hit the sins of each and every one of us right where we live – adultery, anger, arrogance, backbiting, boasting, cheating, covetousness, deceit, disobedience to parents, divorce, drunkenness, envy, fornication, gluttony, gossip, hate, homosexuality, idolatry, ignoring widows and orphans, jealousy, lust, lying, maliciousness, man-stealing, murder, pedophilia, pride, prostitution, racism, seditions, sloth, strife, theft, treachery, trickery, whoremongering, woman-stealing, witchcraft, xenophobia. We will all be better for equal clobbering of sins. Jesus does not say that we cannot and should not help others remove their “motes.” If we cannot say there is a mote but must pretend all is well, all help is lost! However, “Thou hypocrite,” first and foremost “cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.” A large dose of humility works well, seeing all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.

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[i] Notably, he puts the homosexual’s “sins” in “quotes” – while not favoring to do the same for the “sins” of conservative heterosexual Christians.

Hypocrisy, thy name is NBA

Basketball star LeBron James reacted to President Donald Trump’s comment that “he was done watching NBA games if players were going to protest racial injustice during the national anthem.” Speaking for himself and apparently the entire National Basketball Association, James said, “We could care less.”

There is plenty of evidence that he could also care less about human rights violations elsewhere in the world that does not affect his local social justice wokeness! “Defending democracy is vital, but @KingJames only talks loud in the US. All he cares about is money, not human rights. Hypocritical.” So says Joshua Wong as he calls out Lebron James for his silence on China. Yes, China, the NBA’s favorite civil rights violator. The NBA vicariously uses forced labor from China’s Uighur Muslim minority for some league-branded merchandise – including LeBron’s name brand stuff.

James Durso at The Hill says the NBA continually proves the most powerful color in the NBA is not black, but green!

Hypocrisy, thy name is NBA.

Cancel culture, the elite of cyber bullying

Cancel culture, the elite bully pulpit of cyber bullying.

Recent attempts to defend “cancel culture” claims that the discussion is not about free speech. Rather, they say, there is a panic because elites and conservatives over “threatened by changing social norms.” Do not buy the lie. No doubt, there are people who are bothered by changes. However, “cancel culture” is clearly the elite form of bullying that kills all discussion – and it is not just elites and conservatives who are in its clutches. True “free speechers” defend the speech of others with whom they disagree, then answer the disagreements with their own opportunity to speak freely. “Cancel culture” demands all bow before its power and be silent.

“I get a sense among certain young people on social media that the way of making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people...People who do really good stuff have flaws.” Former President Barack Obama

Some recent examples of cancel culture

• Emmanuel Cafferty, fired from San Diego Gas & Electric Company after being goaded into making a hand gesture of which he did not understand the meaning. The recording went viral and he lost his job.
• David Shor, fired from Civis Analytics after sharing the findings of a study by Omar Wasow, a black professor at Princeton, a political-science journal article arguing that nonviolent civil-rights protests had been more politically effective than violent ones.
• Madji Wadi, lost his business after it became public that his daughter has made racist tweets—even though he fired her when he found out.
• Leslie Neal-Boylan, fired from her job as University of Massachusetts-Lowell Dean of Nursing after writing “Everyone’s Life Matters” (in a context clearly against discrimination).
• Nick Cannon, fired by ViacomCBS after comments on Cannon’s Class were deemed to promote anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
• Stephen Hsu, Michigan State University senior vice president for research and innovation, resigned under pressure from petitions excoriating his scientific research on controversial topics.
• Savannah Chavez, the daughter of police officer Ismael Chavez who was killed in the line of duty in McAllen, Texas, uploaded a tribute to her father on Twitter. She received such vile harassment that she just deleted the tribute.
• Gordon Klein, teacher at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, suspended for declining to grade black students easier after the George Floyd incident.
• Daniel Maples, fired from Ted Todd Insurance in Fort Myers, Florida, for a context-less 15 second video of his life that went viral.
• W. Ajax Peris, political science lecturer at UCLA, was referred to UCLA’s Discrimination Prevention Office after reading out loud Martin Luther Kings’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” -- which includes the use of “the n-word.”
• James Bennet, forced to resign as New York Times opinion editor when the intolerant mob could not tolerate certain opinions—though he much of his job purpose was to bring in varied opinions to the paper.
• Stan Wischnowski, forced to resign as top editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer after an uproar over the title of an opinion article that suggested that damaging buildings in Minnesota disproportionately hurt the very people taht protesters were trying to uplift.
• The Church of the Highlands, a multi-racial church of 60,000 people in Birmingham, Alabama, stripped of its lease agreement with the city, and the church’s volunteer work in the community canceled. Why? The church pastor, Chris Hodges, “liked” conservative posts on Twitter.

An employer does not have to let an employee say or do anything they want to on the job. Nevertheless, these examples are of persons not found deficient in their words or actions until hate-filled mobs turned their hostility on them.

Not only firings, the cancel culture extends to treats to life and limb. For example, Catherine Sullivan, a retired professor and University of Georgia alumna, had her location exposed and threats made against her because she disapproved of the university’s decision about names of campus buildings. 

When caught with any backlash, most of the cowardly culprits claim they fired the person for some other reason. Such nonsense should be suspect in light of mewling remarks usually made to the mobs prior to the firings.

The COVID-19 Panic Shows Us Why Science Needs Skeptics -- “The dumpster fire of COVID predictions has shown exactly why it’s important to sustain and nurture skeptics, lest we blunder into scientific monoculture and groupthink.”

More Barberisms

"Progressive Christianity" acts as though Christians should, if they would find difficult a year of consistently living biblically, pledge instead to consistency in living unbiblically. -- Bart Barber in A Ragamuffin Fundamentalist

"I think discipleship is impossible without indulging in at least some measure in something that could be called hypocrisy. Thinking, 'If I can't grow immediately in everything, I'm not going to grow in anything,' is a recipe for perpetual immaturity. God seems to me to be far more concerned with your holiness and your progress in sanctification than in your consistency at every point along the way." -- Bart Barber in A Ragamuffin Fundamentalist

More than a hypocrite

"Am I am pharisee?" Have we ever asked ourselves that question? If we are, we probably haven't!! If we haven't, we should. Every aspect of our lives must be held up for inspection under the light of God's Word. This examination will not hurt us -- it can only help us.

What is a pharisee? To us the word is usually synonymous with hypocrite -- one who feign qualities, virtues, or religious devotion he does not possess. A pharisee is certainly a hypocrite, but more than just a hypocrite. Not the common variety -- but a religious hypocrite; not the lukewarm, but the fanatical. All hypocrites are not pharisees, but all pharisees are hypocrites. To define and understand the pharisee, we must examine the biblical record.

The implication from the Gospels is that the Pharisees were the most numerous and influential sect of the Jewish religion in Jesus' day. The Pharisees were divided from other factions chiefly because of differing positions concerning the law of Moses (Phil. 3:5). By observing their practices, doctrines, and attitudes, we may notice the distinguishing traits of the Pharisees.

The Pharisees were zealous (Rom. 10:2), though their zeal was misguided. They were devoted to their religion. They worked hard and traveled far to make converts (Matt. 23:15). Their devotion to their sect, its tenets, and its traditions was greater than their devotion to God (Mark 7:7,9). Their religion was a false one that shut men out of heaven (Matt. 23:13,15). In their blind zeal for their sect, they carried on a relentless campaign against Jesus and His work. The Pharisees' system of man-made doctrine was not compatible with Jesus' teachings. They impugned His character (Matt. 9:34; 12:24), denied His miracles (John 9:13-18), laid snares for His speech (Matt. 19:3: 22:15), threatened Him (Luke 13:31), attempted to stone Him (John 8:59), and eventually obtained agreement to His death (John 18:3; Matt. 27:20-22; Luke 23:13). Their devotion to their cause and their antagonism towards those who opposed it was so great they could justify the crucifixion of Jesus, and consent to the death of Stephen.

The Pharisees emphasized ritual and outward observance -- washings (Mark 7:3,4), fasting (Matt. 6:16; 9;14), strict Sabbath observance (Matt. 12:2), tithing (Matt. 23:23), public prayers (Matt. 6:5; Luke 18:11), etc. The hypocrite must necessarily have the outward in order to appear religious and righteous before men. Outer form replaces inner character as a sign of who is religious and right.

Doctrinally, Pharisees were strait and narrow (Acts 26:5). If the Sadducess were the religious liberals of Jesus' day, the Pharisees might be called the fundamentalists. They believed in a literal resurrection, angels & spirits (Acts 23:8), and were painstaking in their devotion to law-keeping (with their traditions, of course). Due to their lack of the Spirit, they were doomed to follow the letter. They were so sure they were right, everybody else must be wrong. They were the only scholars (John 7:15). They were self-righteous, covetous, treacherous, merciless -- even bloodthirsty -- but with skillful manipulation of the scriptures, they could justify every action (e.g. Mark 7:7-13).

The Pharisees were no mere hypocrites. They had so refined hypocrisy into a religious system, that Jesus identified their doctrine as hypocrisy (Luke 12:1 with Matt. 16:6, 12). They had a reputation for righteousness (Matt 5:20), but it was a self-heralded righteousness. The Pharisees feigned a religious devotion they did not possess. In the final analysis, they sought to exalt themselves and impress men rather than please God (Matt. 23:5). [Note: they did not necessarily try to please men, but tried to impress them; e.g. Matt. 6:2,5,16].

Jesus did not condemn their keeping of the law, but rather their exalting traditions above God's commands. He did not condemn their scrupulous observance of the details of the law, but rather their failure to observe its major themes. He did not condemn their zeal, but rather the misguided direction of it. Jesus' renunciation of the Pharisees shows that they exalted tradition over commandment, letter over spirit, seen over unseen, minor over major, ritual over spiritual, and that they condemned others while condoning themselves. Every single doctrine and practice was not bad, but their system moulded it all into a deadly combination. Their religion was a farce which outwardly continued that which was once inwardly meaningful to others.

Realize that any keeping of God's commands will be dubbed pharisaical and legalistic by some. Christianity has certain ritual (e.g. baptism, communion, etc.) and certain outwardly visible demands (e.g. modest dress, plain speech, etc.). These should be obeyed without concern for what one might be called. But Pharisees felt that these kinds of things alone marked them as righteous. Some outward things will be part of righteous separated living, but only an inward change of heart -- a washing in the blood of Christ -- makes one righteous. Realize also that claiming one way/doctrine/religion is right and another is wrong is not necssarily pharisaism. The apostles claimed their faith was from God and that both Judaism and paganism were wrong. But Pharisees found their rightness in being a Pharisee. Christians found their rightness in God.

Let's not worry about pharisaism among others. The question before us is, "Am I am pharisee?" If I travel far and wide to convert others to a religious affiliation rather than preach the gospel -- I am a Pharisee. If I exalt my forefathers, history and traditions above the commands of God -- I am a Pharisee. If I relentlessly, though insidiously, attack the words of God -- I am a Pharisee. If I observe outward motions without inward movement -- I am a Pharisee. If I follow the letter but not the Spirit -- I am a Pharisee. If I major on minors and minor on majors -- I am a Pharisee. If I feign righteousness and devotion -- I am a Pharisee. If I use the Bible to try to convict others, and it never condemns me -- I am a Pharisee.

The result of Pharisaism in Judaea was the existence of a self-righteous religionist who thumbed his nosed at sinners. I wonder if one reason Pharisees compassed land and sea to make one proselyte was that they would not reach down to the masses under their feet? And perhaps they could not, because the masses knew what they were. Maybe they had to find someone who didn't know them!! The failure of the Pharisees, though, did have the effect of highlighting the One who spoke "not as the scribes," and "the common people heard Him gladly."

The problem of pharisaism is not just one of legalism, ritual and tradition. These are symptoms of the problem. When religious affiliation and doctrinal correctness become more important than relationship with God, then religion becomes a clean-swept shell of a house which is completely empty inside. The outside must be kept freshly painted and beautifully adorned -- that it may appear someone dwells within. Sepulchres, however lovely, merely hold dead men's bones!

When presented with this challenge, we usually look at someone else (Matt. 23:29-35). The publicans and harlots had an advantage over the Pharisees -- they knew they were sinners (Matt. 21:32; Luke 5:30-32). The Pharisee will not get what the publican got until he gets where the publican was. Read Luke 18:9-14. May we, like Nicodemus, seek Him even if we must come by night. May I not say "I thank Thee that I am not as other men are," but rather, "God be merciful to me a sinner."

(A slight rewrite of an article that appeared in The Baptist Waymark, March-April 1995, page 1)

Note: In an e-mail on February 6th, Brother Hoyt Sparks called attention to two references that add information to show the totality of who the Pharisees were: John 8:23, "Ye are from beneath; I am from above: ye are of this world; I am not of this world"; and John 8:44, "Ye are of your father, the devil, and the lusts of you father ye will do."