When HGTV pulled the plug on a reality TV show starring North Carolina real estate dealers and brothers David and Jason Benham following a Right Wing Watch report on David’s anti-gay, anti-choice, anti-Muslim activism, David Benham insisted that the network withdrew support due to misinformation and “lying,” asserting that neither he nor his brother “hate homosexuals.”
Although Religious Right activists have been rushing to defend Benham, none has yet been able to explain how Right Wing Watch’s list of verbatim quotes from Benham constituted misinformation.
In fact, the interviews we featured in our post are just examples of Benham’s large portfolio of right-wing activism. Since writing our original post, we have found several other examples of Benham’s extremism.
Benham’s group refers to abortion rights as a “holocaust” and said that “the devil” was behind Roe v. Wade.
In a January 2012 interview, Benham explained his “love” for homosexuals when he suggested that gay people are under the control of “demonic forces,” arguing that once he succeeds in recriminalizing abortion, he will next defeat the “homosexual agenda” and Islam.
Benham was speaking with none other than Michael Brown, an anti-gay activist who has gone so far as to defend Uganda’s brutal homosexuality law and who leads a group which includes Benham as a board member.
Benham: We have the tools, we have the stones, we have the weapons, we’ve been faithful with the lion and bear stories, we’re charging at this Goliath called abortion and when we take Goliath down, I promise you, all of the church will start coming out of the caves. The homosexual agenda is next, tolerance towards radical Islam is next, we’re going to start taking these Goliaths down, we’re not afraid anymore.
Brown: To take them down means with the life of Jesus, light instead of darkness, life instead of death, transformation instead of bondage.
Benham: ‘Our struggle is not against flesh and blood but against the principalities, rulers and authorities of darkness.’ We love these people and so we are not going to allow the demonic forces and agendas behind them to destroy life.
In an August 2012 edition of Brown’s show, Benham said that Islam is a “demonic agenda that wants to come and take America” and repeated the bogus right-wing myth that President Obama endorsed a Muslim prayer rally.
He also told Brown that he is leading a “spiritual battle” against Islam, warning that the United States will soon “change gods,” embrace Islam and invite war.
Previously, the Anti-Defamation League reported that Benham called mosques a “den of iniquity” and said Muslims are “enslaved in the tyrannical bondage of Islam” and are “the enemy attacking” America.
