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.
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”.
Alabama isn’t a monolith, though.