Louisiana pastor Tony Spell is in trouble after beating up a 20-year-old man across the street from his church in Baton Rouge. According to Spell, he was working on a church bus when the man started shouting at him and threatened to rape his wife, rape his grandchildren, and kill them the next time he went out of town.
The other side, of course, denies that account, and now the whole thing is headed for court. Fine. Let the lawyers sort out the criminal charges. But if those threats were actually made the way Spell says they were, then this wasn’t some harmless exchange of insults or neighborhood trash talk.
Threatening to rape a man’s wife and grandchildren and murder them is not “running your mouth.” That is the kind of thing that instantly drags a situation out of the category of free speech and into the category of consequences.
And frankly, while I’m not going to pretend pastors are supposed to be out here handing out curbside chiropractic adjustments to the jaw, I also can’t work up much outrage over the natural impulse behind it. As a husband and father myself, a man hears a punk tell him, to his face, that his wife and grandchildren are going to be raped and killed, and then we’re all supposed to act stunned when the conversation suddenly turns physical?
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Please. Again, the courts can decide what to do with Tony Spell. I’m just saying that if the threat happened the way he says it did, there is a decent chance this clown has now learned a valuable lesson about making rape-and-murder threats to another man’s family.
Namely, don’t.
And I bet he won’t do it again.
Make a 
