Tony Spell, pastor of the Life Tabernacle Church of Central City, La., waits outside the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, Monday, June 7, 2021. Spell, who flouted coronavirus restrictions last year, prepared Monday to ask the court to revive his lawsuit challenging the restrictions.
Credit: AP Photo/Gerald Herbert
The notorious Covidiot Christian evangelical preacher of greed and selfishness, Pastor Tony Spell of the Life Tabernacle Church of Central City, Louisiana, USA, is back in the news again. He has still not given up his lucrative campaign for self-martyrdom by being 'persecuted' for encouraging his idiot followers to put themselves and others at risk by attending non-Covid-safe services in his church, despite the ban on such gatherings.
He first came to prominence when he saw a get-rich-quick opportunity in the $1,200 stimulus checks the Trump administration handed out to try to kick-start the economy after the first coronavirus wave and lockdown in spring 2020. He demanded his congregation hand their checks over to him!
After refusing to close his church and continuing to hold superspreader services he was later arrested and placed under house arrest, whereupon his equally selfish mother, Magi, organised a blocking of the Baton Rouge Police Department's phone system with a mass phone-in when she published their phone number on her Facebook page and urged people to ring it in support of her son, Pastor Tony, so putting the entire community at risk, unable to make emergency calls for police assistance.
But even that didn't satiate his desire for martyrdom, so, having been fitted with a tracking devise on his ankle to ensure his compliance with the court order forbidding him from holding church services, he not only held a service in a church some distance from his house, but then boasted about it on social media, positively begging to be arrested for breaching the court order.
Now, according to this report in Religion News Service he faces six state criminal counts as a result of repeatedly flouting the public health restrictions and his layers have asked a federal appeals court in New Orleans to revive Spell's law suit, dismissed by a federal judge in Baton Rouge last November. The suit was dismissed by U.S. District Judge Brian Jackson, who said the suit against Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards and others was largely moot because the restrictions had been repeatedly eased over several months. Since that ruling, almost all state restrictions have been lifted.
Spell is also appealing, through his lawyers against the ruling by Judge Jackson that he was not entitled to damages.
Last November, the Supreme Court's refused to get involved in the 5th Circuit Court refusal to issue a temporary order blocking earlier restrictions on church services and other gatherings that had already been relaxed. However, Spell is not one to give up on his campaign for martyrdom, and a large sum of money by way of compensation, for being required to comply with laws he feels, as an entitled evangelical Christian, to ignore if he so wishes. He has granted himself a special dispensation and sees no reason why this should be overridden for the sake of public safety and the general welfare of his congregation and the wider community, by mere elected officials in the state. As a white evangelical Christian, Spell evidently believes America is his country, to do with as he wishes, and laws are there to control other people.
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