Parents have a right to pimp out their 14-year-old daughters, suggests anti-gay pastor
Anti-gay pastor Flip Benham has defended parents’ “right” to pimp out their 14-year-old daughters.
Flip Benham, a notorious homophobic ‘preacher’ known for his counter-protests at Pride events, made the shocking claim in a radio interview.
The evangelical preacher was speaking out in defence of Roy Moore, an ultra-conservative Republican candidate who has resisted calls to resign amid child molestation allegations.
Moore is alleged to have had a sexual encounter with a 14-year-old girl when he was in his 30s. In his aggressive statement, Moore did not deny taking underage girls on ‘dates’, but insisted he always got permission from their parents before taking them out.
Speaking to Alabama radio hosts Matt Murphy and Andrea Lindenberg, Benham defended Moore – suggesting he only resorted to underage girls because all the women were already taken.
Benham said: “I think that, number one, you need to understand, 40 years ago, what the Sitz im Leben was like in Alabama. It wasn’t unusual.
“Judge Roy Moore graduated from West Point and then went on into the service, served in Vietnam and then came back and was in law school.
“All of the ladies… that he possibly could have married were not available then, they were already married by then.
“So he looked in a different direction and always with the [permission of the] parents of younger ladies.”
Benham added: “He did that because there is something about a purity of a young woman, there is something that is good, that’s true, that’s straight and he looked for that.
“Just a simple question, all I’m going to ask you is this. Is it alright for a man who is 30 years old to date and court a young lady who is 14 years old, with their parents’ consent?
“So the parents don’t have a right to do that?”
Turning the tables, Murphy said: “Is it alright for a man to court and date a young lady, with her parents’ permission, who is 10 years old? Yes or no.”
Benham refused to immediately condemn the suggestion, saying: “I don’t think that that would happen.”
He added: “I don’t know… what are you talking about? Does God make a stone so heavy that he can’t lift it?”
The pastor continued to avoid the question, before eventually saying: “No.”
Talking over the pastor, the radio host joked: “Congratulations, Flip. Now you are in the modern world.”
Benham spends much of his time residing in the eighteenth century.
The pastor protested a Pride parade last year, screaming at people to “stop celebrating sodomy”.
He added: “How is it that when a man puts his penis up another man’s rectum that is somehow called a good thing?”
Benham also attended a meeting of Charlotte City Council where he said the city’s streets would “run with blood” because it wants to allow transgender rights.
He said: “You cannot make a moral wrong a civil right.”
The pastor is the father of failed TV hosts David and Jason Benham, who are also anti-gay activists.
The Benham twins, who spend as much time together as Jaime and Cersei Lannister, were axed from a home conversion TV show after execs were made aware that they had long records of religious anti-LGBT activism.
David Benham has previously claimed he convinced a man to renounce his homosexuality – by offering him baseball tickets.
He said: “We had so many people from the gay community reaching out to us and one man in particular from the city of Chicago reached out and he said things to me that made me lose my appetite.
“But I simply responded in love. After a little conversation back and forth, I found out he loved baseball and I got him tickets to a Cubs game.
“He shot me a Facebook post and said, ‘I was not expecting that and I’ve been thinking a lot about this. I’ve chosen to walk away from my lifestyle’.
“Love filled our heart. We had absolutely no hatred. What God needs most is a simple voice for truth.”
David Benham previously claimed that same-sex marriage is a Satanic plot.
He claimed: “We’ve deconstructed gender – it’s an ultimate attack on the Creator… you deny truth, then you have a darkened heart, then you displace God. God no longer matters. From there it goes to degrading passion and then a depraved mind.
So this is where we find ourselves as a culture, is with a depraved mind where we’re celebrating and even forcing others to participate in immorality.
He continues: “The Lord wants us to have life, and this whole deconstruction of gender, this whole redefinition of marriage, all of these things is a mask for Satan who is robbing and killing and destroying these people who desperately want life.
“They want to seek the love of a father, trying to find it in the arms of another man and they’ll never find it there.”
The Benhams have compared their experience of being sacked for hate speech to that of people murdered by ISIS.