http://www.charlotte.com/mld/observer/news/6143464.htm
His
is a ministry of confrontation
Flip
Benham speaks up -- loudly -- on abortion, other issues
CRISTINA C. BREEN
Staff Writer
Philip
"Flip" Benham knows his harsh words and gruesome photos
shock and offend.
He
says his message demands confrontation.
The
leader of Operation Rescue/Operation Save America, has moved his
organization from Dallas to Concord, creating a new epicenter for
what he sees as a fight against the sins of abortion, homosexuality
and Islam.
Benham
and his group have been involved in some of the most publicized
anti-abortion events in the past decade. In 1995, he baptized Norma
McCorvey, who was Jane Roe in the Roe v. Wade case that legalized
abortion. McCorvey last week sought to reopen her case and overturn
the 1973 landmark decision.
Benham
says he seeks to awaken the Charlotte region.
He'll
host the annual Operation Save America conference in Charlotte on
July 12-20, an event that moves each year and usually draws hundreds.
Participants will hold a funeral for aborted fetuses, and read the
Bible in front of churches and mosques and along major thoroughfares.
In
the past few months, Benham has become a common sight at Charlotte's
three abortion clinics.
Last
month, he took a poster of an aborted fetus to the National Day
of Prayer events uptown. He disrupted the Charlotte gay and lesbian
festival by screaming throughout a commitment ceremony for more
than a dozen couples.
It's
not the way things have been done in Charlotte. The anti-abortion
movement here has been mostly a quiet and prayerful one in recent
years. Small groups of Catholics gather at clinics on Saturdays
to say the rosary. A few churches sponsor homes or crisis pregnancy
centers for struggling mothers.
Benham,
55, has evoked wariness even in this Bible Belt region with a strong
conservative Christian community. Charlotte-Mecklenburg police are
assigned to his demonstrations, and Benham says local pastors aren't
publicly supportive.
"The
evangelical church has been asleep here in Charlotte," he says.
"It's as if they've got this awkward peace with the abortion
industry."
Violence
abhorred
Some
local church leaders have said they're still getting to know him
and have avoided making judgments. Abortion clinic managers react
angrily when he shows up, but don't comment publicly about his tactics.The
Rev. Mick Hinson, senior pastor at Metropolitan Community Church,
which draws large numbers of gays and lesbians, says he'll hire
off-duty police officers to patrol the church's large events from
now on. Members of Operation Save America showed up at a Bible seminar
last month and upset some people when they dominated the discussion,
Hinson says.
Cindy
Thomson, co-coordinator of the Charlotte chapter of the National
Organization for Women, says she's worried.
"That
organization seems to engender hatred and violence," she said.
"They try to say they don't do that, but it seems some of the
followers get a little radical. We want to keep our clinics safe."
Photos
showing Benham being arrested at clinic demonstrations hang on his
office walls, and he's been jailed for months at a time. But he
says he abhors violence and has denounced the killings of doctors
and the bombing of clinics.
He
says he cheered last month's capture of Eric Rudolph, who is accused
of bombing two abortion clinics, a gay nightclub and an Olympics
event.
"This
man was no anti-abortionist," he says. "This man was mad
at the world."
National
and state anti-abortion organizations both compliment and fall silent
on Benham's group.
"He's
a very engaging, committed, dedicated guy. He's doing a great job,"
says Ann Scheidler, executive director of the Chicago-based Pro-Life
Action League.
Leaders
of the National Right to Life Committee responded to questions about
Operation Save America by faxing their policy stating their opposition
to violence. A spokeswoman didn't return calls seeking clarification.
Winding
path to leadership
Flip
Benham was a saloon owner in Kissimmee, Fla., and a heavy drinker
until 1976, when a stranger invited him to a Free Methodist church.
There, he says, he found God. He entered the seminary and started
a Free Methodist church in Dallas in 1980.
He
became involved in Operation Rescue in 1988, when the group was
staging massive protests at abortion clinics, including several
in Atlanta, where they blocked women from entering and heckled doctors
and workers.
Although
he hadn't been a national leader in the group, Benham inherited
Operation Rescue in 1994, after the departure of founders Randall
Terry and Keith Tucci. Terry left the group as clinic violence increased
and lawsuits mounted against Operation Rescue. He later ran for
Congress, divorced his wife and married a younger woman, and left
his Pentecostal church. Benham and Terry have publicly expressed
dislike for each other.
Tucci,
who resigned to pastor a church in Pennsylvania and started an international
anti-abortion group, says Benham was best suited for leading the
group because of his strong character and family life and sound
biblical principles.
He
started using the name Operation Save America after taking over
the organization, but uses the names Operation Rescue and Operation
Save America interchangeably in literature.
While
his group doesn't draw attention like it did during the 1980s and
1990s when members were blockading clinics, it retains a core of
followers who flock to annual meetings and write in to the Web site
about their activities.
Abortion
protesters reduced their activities during the 1990s after a series
of court decisions prohibited them from blocking clinic doors and
menacing patients, doctors and staff. But anti-abortion groups scored
a victory in February when the Supreme Court decided that federal
racketeering and extortion laws were wrongly used to prevent their
protests.
Benham
says the organization has been sued so often that it doesn't have
any assets. He says his office, computers and equipment are leased
or donated so they can't be seized.
Benham,
though, can turn the tables. Earlier this month, he was in a Wichita,
Kan., courtroom, suing the city for not issuing a parade permit
to Operation Rescue in June 2001.
"We
call ourselves the dirty pro-lifers," Benham says. "The
clean pro-lifers work in politics. They never get their hands dirty.
They never touch the women."
Benham
moved to Concord last year to fulfill the dream of the late David
Drye, a Concord businessman and Operation Rescue supporter who had
wanted the organization and others like it to move here. Drye was
a conservative political activist and religious leader who had a
local cable TV show in Cabarrus County.
Before
he died in a 1999 plane crash, Drye encouraged Benham's twin sons,
Jason and David, 27, to move to the Charlotte area. They came two
years ago. Benham's wife, Faye, and his five children, ages 11 through
30, often join him at clinic demonstrations.
Benham
operates from a small two-room office near downtown Concord. He
says he'd like to open an office next door to a Charlotte abortion
clinic.
He
says he doesn't receive a salary out of Operation Save America funds,
but makes a living giving speeches, writing articles and accepting
personal donations.
Besides
his morning clinic protests, Benham spends his days meeting with
pastors and potential supporters, including two Concord doctors
who have offered to care for women who decide to have their babies
instead of abortions.
He
says he doesn't know how many people are involved in Operation Rescue/Operation
Save America because the group doesn't have a roster.
But supporters from Florida to South Dakota have formed Operation
Save America chapters. Members' activities range from stroller parades
outside abortion clinics to a man who was arrested after he sneaked
into a clinic.
A
box of new T-shirts sits in Benham's office. They are black, with
the word "Intolerant" branded across the front in big,
white letters. In smaller print is a John 14:6 passage: "I
am the way, the truth, the life ..."
On
the back: "Homosexuality is a sin. Islam is a lie. Abortion
is murder. Some issues are just black and white."
Benham
smiles. "This is the bad-guy T-shirt," he says. He calls
the T-shirt he is wearing -- white with a cross on an American flag
and the words "Jesus is the standard" -- "the good-guy
T-shirt."
White shirt or black, he knows he offends people, as he did at the
gay pride festival last month.
Benham
says his words are harsh, but his message is love.
"It
seems ugly, my speech. But it's because we love them that we scream
at them. You have to have a bad guy who will confront them. Somebody
was a bad guy to me when I was an alcoholic.
"Abortion
will end in ... Charlotte and in America when the church of Jesus
Christ makes up her mind it will end, and not a second sooner. We,
the church, are most responsible for the holocaust that is going
on here."
Nationally,
sentiment on abortions has remained fairly constant throughout the
past decade, with about six in 10 Americans opposing the overturning
of Roe v. Wade, according to a January poll by the Pew Research
Center for Public and the Press.
Encounter
at `gates of hell'
At
7:30 on a Wednesday morning, Benham is standing at what he calls
the "gates of hell" -- the driveway of a Charlotte medical
park that houses a women's clinic that performs abortions.
Chest-high
posters of cute babies and dismembered fetuses line Wendover Road
leading to the clinic. Benham put them there. "Jesus loves
you!" he merrily tells a woman pulling into the parking lot
in a gray sedan. She stops the car; he hands her a pamphlet.
"Do
you know they're killing little babies right here?" he asks
her, holding a Bible in one hand and pointing to the building behind
him with the other. "Why don't you go tell them to stop?"
The
woman nods and smiles and drives on.
Fifteen
minutes later, a woman in a van swerves, purple-faced, into the
lot.
"You
are traumatizing children! You are sending children to school looking
at pictures of torn-up babies!" she shouts at Benham.
He
responds: I show those pictures to my own children.
The
woman shakes her head, rolls up her window, and drives off.
Cristina Breen: (704) 358-5697; cbreen@charlotteobserver.com.
|