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Reprinted from the Houston Chronicle, May 31, 1998.
Bio: Flip Benham
By Jim Henderson
of the Houston Chronicle
GARLAND, TX. - Flip Benham has been sprung from the Lynchburg, Va., jail and he's going
to Disney World.
It's not a vacation to celebrate his freedom after two and a half months; this is
business. The preacher who has been locked up more times than a streetwalker will gather
his flock in Orlando, Fla.,this week to take on child pornography, abortion and Disney
World - and do his time for it if necessary.
"Our lawyers have told us to try not to get arrested," he
says, while shooting
hoops with his son in the back yard of his modest home in this Dallas suburb. "I told
them it will be hard, but we'll try."
Benham, a 50-year-old Methodist minister, is the national leader of Dallas-based
Operation Rescue, a militant anti-abortion group with a reputation for blocking entrances
at abortion clinics, shouting insults at doctors and patients and daring the cops to bust
them for it.
But the Florida campaign (today through June 7) is a departure from the organization's
previous narrow focus on abortion issues. By targeting Barnes and Noble Booksellers in
Orlando - "They sell child pornography," Benham says - and Gay Day at Disney
World, Operation Rescue is inviting a whole new set of allies and adversaries
into the
fray.
"I think it's good that their larger agenda is being shown for what it is - right
wing across the board," says Rebecca Isaacs of the National Gay and Lesbian Task
Force in Washington, D.C. She refers to Operation Rescue demonstrators as "those
nasty people" who behave like the Ku Klux Klan.
"They might as well be wearing sheets," she says. "They're for
censorship, against gay and lesbian families and against a woman's right to health. This
seems like a desperate attempt to broaden their appeal with the right wing. I hope people
(at Disney World on Gay Day) just ignore them."
That may not be easy to do. Since the early 1980s, when he became a devout convert to
the anti-abortion movement, Benham has been almost impossible to ignore. He has approached
the cause like a Holy War, and his protesters and placards have appeared just about
everywhere an abortion clinic has opened.
He maintains that targeting Disney for hosting Gay Day and Barnes and Noble for selling
art books with controversial nude photos of children is not a deviation from his
organization's core purpose. Like the recent spate of children being killed by other
children, he argues, the acceptance of child pornography and homosexuality are part of a
continuum of immorality that devalues life and families.
"We're the only ones unashamedly bringing the gospel of Jesus Christ to the gates
of hell," he says.
Although he has preached nonviolence, his group has employed
strident, normally
offensive methods to discourage women from entering clinics engaged in a legal business.
He's been jailed more times than he can count - "Less than a hundred, more than
50," he says - and the walls of his home are adorned with photographs of him being
carried from clinics in handcuffs.
Abortion has been legal since 1973 and there is no indication that a change is
imminent, but Benham does not consider his crusade futile. He goes to his desk and pulls
out a letter he received from a woman while he was in the Lynchburg jail. Attached to it
is a photograph of a baby whose mother had considered an abortion.
"It's not a lost cause," he says. "When you know children are alive
because of what you've done, it's worth it."
Benham, a father of five, has not always been an anti-abortion zealot. Before he found
religion, in fact, he was a saloonkeeper (not a particularly honest one, by his own
admission), a heavy drinker, and when his wife, Faye, became pregnant with the twin sons
who will graduate from college this year, he wanted her to have an abortion.
"I was a drunk," he says.
When Benham was discharged from the Army in 1973, his father, a bar owner in Syracuse,
N.Y., set Benham up in business, giving him his own joint, the Mad Hatter Saloon in
Kissimmee, Fla., 11 miles from Disney World.
"I did awful things," says Benham. "I used to cheat people on their ham
sandwiches. Why would you do that . . . short the ham on a sandwich?"
One day, he was visited by a coffee urn salesman, who also was something of a
missionary. He invited Benham to his church, even drove to his house the next Sunday
morning to offer him and his wife a ride. They declined the ride but followed him to
church.
"It was a Free Methodist church," Benham says. "There was a young
preacher who really got to me. After the service, I told my wife to drive home because I
wanted to walk. I walked 4 1/2 miles and cried like a baby the whole way."
Soon, he was closing his saloon at 3 a.m., getting up at 6 and driving 60 miles to Lake
Wales, Fla., to take a religious course at Warner Southern College, a small school
affiliated with the Church of God.
Eventually, he closed the saloon for good and enrolled in Asbury Theological Seminary
in Kentucky. In 1980, he moved to Dallas to start his own Free Methodist church.
"In seminary, we didn't talk much about abortion," Benham says. "We felt
it was OK." That attitude was reflected in his own ministry until 1982, he says, when
he attended a pastor's seminar and a speaker raised the question of when God's presence
was first realized on Earth.
"He said it was not with the birth of Jesus," Benham says, "but when the
Holy Spirit visited Mary (and Jesus was conceived). Instantly everything about abortion
was changed for me."
Unsatisfied with just the pulpit as a forum, he joined up with Operation Rescue, one of
the more contentious anti-abortion groups. Its founder, Randall Terry, denounced the
violence that was occurring outside clinics (five killings in the past seven years - none
of which was linked to Operation Rescue) but his statements often were less than emphatic.
After a Pensacola abortion doctor was shot and killed in 1993, Terry said, "While
we grieve for him and his widow and his children, we must also grieve for the thousands of
children he has murdered."
By the time Benham took over the organization in 1994, the violence had not only dealt
a public relations blow to the entire anti-abortion movement, but legislators - from City
Hall to Congress - were responding with tougher penalties to deal with protesters.
"They kept raising the cost of protesting," Benham says. "Class C
misdemeanors were made class B misdemeanors. Instead of going to jail for a day, you could
go for six months."
Congress upped the ante with the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, which made
blocking a clinic door a felony punishable by as much as five years in prison.
Going a step further in a Chicago civil case, attorneys for the National Organization
for Women invoked the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO),
which was written as a tool for criminal prosecution of mobsters and drug dealers - not to
silence political and social movements.
Still, a federal jury recently accepted NOW's arguments that in attempting to deter
women from having abortions, the protesters engaged in conspiracy and extortion.
Under RICO, any monetary award set by the jury is tripled.
Even without RICO, Operation Rescue has been hit with staggering verdicts in civil
cases around the country, including $10 million in Dallas and $1.2 million in Houston.
"I just tell them take a number and get in line," Benham laughs. "We
have never paid a penny to anyone."
Because of the penalties, Benham says, the number of anti-abortion activists willing to
gather at abortion clinics has dwindled. But his tactics seldom changed, except, maybe, to
reveal a side of Benham that was often hidden behind his belligerent facade - the charmer
who could quickly turn intimidation into seduction.
One of his most dramatic confrontations occurred in 1994 outside a Dallas bookstore,
where Norma McCorvey was signing copies of her autobiography.
"Norma McCorvey," Benham shouted, "you are responsible for the deaths of
over 33 million children.
"McCorvey was the "Jane Roe" whose lawsuit against Dallas County
District Attorney Henry Wade led to the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion.
Besides hawking her book, she also worked at A Choice For Women, an abortion clinic in
northeast Dallas.
Six months later, Benham rented office space next door to the clinic and located
Operation Rescue's national headquarters there. After an initial period of hostilities,
the clinic workers and Benham 's staffers began to mingle. They met outside and discussed
their differences. Soon, several women from the clinic were regulars at Operation Rescue's
offices.
One of them was McCorvey. By the middle of summer, she was a full-fledged disciple of
the anti-abortion cause and a born-again Christian. Early in August 1995, she was baptized
in a backyard swimming pool by the preacher she had once called a "terrorist,"
Flip Benham himself.
So startling was McCorvey's conversion that a Texas Monthly writer went in search of
the explanation. She interviewed Benham over lunch in a Mexican restaurant and later
wrote: "I couldn't take my eyes off of him. Benham has swept-back hair and a voice as
velvety as hot queso, but what makes him mesmerizing is the way he uses his large blue
eyes. Even before our tacos arrived, I realized I was in the grip of a man who knows how
to cast a spell over a woman."
But at the "Gates of Hell," Benham
speak for the front line in the war on
immorality, charm is a flimsy shield against aggressive prosecutors.
His latest incarceration grew out of a program Operation Rescue began early in 1997 -
taking its case to high schools across the country and displaying large photographs of
aborted fetuses and other graphic literature.
"God was expelled from the schools in 1962," he says, explaining the new
strategy. "He has been replaced with metal detectors, violence, condoms and drugs. Kids
are spinning around like a ball in a pinball machine. That's why they're killing each
other."
We've told them we can solve a problem by killing what's in the womb and we're reaping
the consequences outside of the womb. They don't need more education, they need
redemption."
In Lynchburg late last year, he rallied about 150 students of the Rev. Jerry Falwell's
Liberty University, where his sons were seniors, to demonstrate outside a high school. They
exhibited the grotesque photographs and told arriving students they were bound for hell if
they didn't find Jesus. Even Falwell was put off by the demonstration; he paid for police
to work overtime to handle the crowd.
When police asked the group of move off the school property, they complied and
assembled across the street. There were no arrests. But a month later, Benham and two
Liberty students were indicted by a grand jury for misdemeanor trespassing.
Benham was tried and sentenced to a year in jail. Six months were suspended and with
good-time credits, he would be out in less than three months. He served his time in a
large cell with 23 other inmates. He counseled them, he says, and taught one illiterate
young man to read.
"It's not such a bad place to be," he says. "Much of the New Testament
was written in jails. I was in their prison, but I was never their prisoner."
Did the experience cause him to reconsider his methods?"
We can't change our strategy," he says with a smile, his eyes lighting up just a
little. "That's why we're going to Disney World . . . to the Tragic Kingdom."
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