Charles and Te’Andrea Wilson

Worst Apology of the Month: First Baptist Church of Crystal Springs, Mississippi

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

A prominent member of the First Baptist Church of Crystal Springs, Miss.

It’s time to add a new Ethics Alarms category— the Worst Apology. Apologies seem to be flying around faster than usual as campaign season intensifies, though some individuals who desperately need to apologize—like, say, Harry Reid, are not.

I’ll be using the Ethics Alarms Apology Scale to rank the rotten apologies in our future. Ironically, the first winner in the category is a rare form of putrid apology that doesn’t even appear on the scale. The lowest ranking on the scale is a 10 ( “An insincere and dishonest apology designed to allow the wrongdoer to escape accountability cheaply, and to deceive his or her victims into forgiveness and trust, so they are vulnerable to future wrongdoing”), but the recent apology by the First Baptist Church of Crystal Springs, Miss. pulls an 11. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Rev. Stan Weatherford

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Rev. Weatherford with a parishioner

The First Baptist Church of Crystal Springs, Mississippi has never hosted the wedding of a black couple in its 150 year history, so you can imagine how important it was to the congregation not to break a perfect record. All right, that’s unfair: only a handful of white church members protested to Rev. Stan Weatherford when they learned that he was preparing to wed Charles and Te’Andrea Wilson at First Baptist, but their threat that they would have him voted out of his job if he did was sufficient to cause him to tell Charles and Te’Andrea, just two days before the scheduled ceremony, that they would have to move the event to another church.

“I didn’t want to have a controversy within the church, and I didn’t want a controversy to affect the wedding of Charles and Te’Andrea. I wanted to make sure their wedding day was a special day,” Weatherford told local reporters. Continue reading →