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Here’s one diploma mill story where UD’s not going to blame the diploma mill graduate.

She’s going to blame the fools on his church’s hiring committee.

Monseigneur Pastor His Holiness Rafer Byrdsong did everything humanly possible to reveal his comprehensive fraudulence to the Third Baptist Church of Suffield, Connecticut. He provided reams of obviously bogus educational and other background documentation. A local news channel reports:

… He claimed he was a Navy chaplain. When the I-Team received his service records, it was discovered he was in the Navy, but as a cook.

The Chaplain Corps said they never heard of him.

No records exist for many of Byrdsong’s former parishes, and officials in Florida and California said there were no records that the colleges and universities he claimed to attend ever existed either.

When the I-Team looked in to the school that supposedly gave Byrdsong a doctorate, it was discovered there was a school with a similar name that would give anyone a PH.D. to anyone who pays for it, with no classes required.

Upon closer inspections, all of the documents given by Byrdsong to the church when he applied to be pastor were full of misspellings.

The certificate for the doctorate even had the word diploma misspelled.

… While digging into Byrdsong’s past, his ex-wife was found. She said she divorced him and brought bigamy charges against him when she found out he was married to five other women. She said hearing what Channel 3 found made her sad, but it wasn’t a surprise.

Pamela Mann said, “Can he preach? Yes. Can he teach? Yes. Does he have the persona that would bring people to him, yes, as any good con artist would.”…

I don’t care how small your church is. If you can’t even be bothered to check one of the claims a candidate for pastor makes, it’s your fault when you end up with Elmer Gantry.

Margaret Soltan, May 17, 2010 7:51AM
Posted in: diploma mill

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2 Responses to “Here’s one diploma mill story where UD’s not going to blame the diploma mill graduate.”

  1. University Diaries » I put a spell… Says:

    […] The magical doctors teach at universities and run legal systems and lead political parties and keep us on the true path at church. […]

  2. University Diaries » You do this long enough, the same stories keep happening. Says:

    […] was Rafer Byrdsong, liar, bigamist, what have […]

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Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
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