Operation Save America Takes a Holiday

If you didn’t drive by one of Charlotte’s three abortion clinics last week, you may not have noticed that Operation Save America (OSA), the arbiter of morality and judger of all things Christian, was out of town.

Philip “Flip” Benham and his band of baby savers last week laid siege at the lone remaining clinic in Mississippi that performs abortions — the Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Last year, the clinic was the subject of a powerful PBS documentary. This year, it was subjected to OSA. The group’s mission: shut down a clinic that’s already the target of legislative efforts to force its closure through relentless regulation. Abortion-rights supporters have termed the legal tactic of closing clinics through legislation “targeted regulation of abortion providers,” or TRAP, laws.

“It was powerful,” Benham said Monday. “It was the safest week for little baby girls and little baby boys in their wombs in Mississippi since 1973.”

This was the first time in years OSA focused so monomaniacally on Jackson. But Charlotteans have been subjected to his tactics since Benham moved the organization, formerly — and more notoriously — known as Operation Rescue, to Cabarrus County in 2002. Whether it’s a bunch of high school kids hoping to form a Gay-Straight Alliance, a strip club opening, or a woman trying to get an abortion, Benham and Co. are there, waving their signs and screaming. In Jackson, their efforts included burning a copy of the Koran and a rainbow flag. They also protested outside Episcopal and Unitarian Universalist churches, telling the parishioners within that they aren’t true Christians.

Despite his antipathy for a rag like Creative Loafing and the values it supposedly represents (“Yeech. Stunning, homosexual stuff,” Benham told writer Sam Boykin last year at a strip club protest), the effusively theocratic Flip Benham has never failed to speak to us — or any other publication. Like his local elected official equivalent, So-Hungry-For-Media-Attention-He-Need-Not-Be-Named, Benham loves to talk: Turn off the cameras and the tape recorders, and he might disappear. Because Benham has the megaphone so often (quite literally — he often can be found on Saturdays shouting at women outside Family Reproductive Health in Charlotte), we wanted to know what it’s like to deal with him face-to-face when you’re Benham’s opposition, not a writer interested in a quick quote.

“He just seems to be a brash, out-there, in-your-face kind of guy,” said Cindy Thomson, coordinator of the National Organization for Women’s Charlotte chapter. “A lot of local fundamentalists, that’s not the way they behave.”

Judging by the license plates she sees on cars near abortion protests (where, she claims, Benham has pushed aside both her and her husband to block clinic driveways), Thomson believes the base for Operation Save America isn’t local. That could be why the organization doesn’t have much clout locally — except as a group many publicly reproach. OSA’s regular clinic protests haven’t resulted in any closures (representatives of Charlotte’s clinics declined to talk to us or referred us to the National Abortion Federation).

In recent years, Benham’s higher profile efforts have been targeted not at scared women but at gays and lesbians. One event OSA has seemed to affect is the annual gay pride celebration. Charlotte NC Black Gay Pride’s festivities July 20 through July 23 went off without a hitch. But gay leaders didn’t seek a permit this year to hold the larger pride events in Marshall Park after OSA activists disrupted — or witnessed at, depending on your perspective — the festival last year. “We try to tell them in the kindest way that it’s impossible to be a Christian and a practicing homosexual at the same time,” Benham said in April.

OSA is on the mailing list for the Lesbian & Gay Community Center, and Benham once visited the center at a celebration of Mecklenburg County commissioners’ vote in May 2005 to add sexual orientation to the county’s nondiscrimination policy. “He came and he sat down right in front of me, which made me real happy,” said Linda Davis, the Center’s development assistant. She chuckled. “He turned around to me and he asked me if I had a pen so he could take notes. I had some pens in my purse, but I deliberately got one of the pens from the front [desk] that has one of the rainbow signs.”

Said Thomson: “He came in by himself, which was pretty brave, I would say. I don’t know how he would think he would not be recognized.”

In his Web site report of the evening, Benham would write Thomson “is walking in outright rebellion against God. She has never heard of an abortion she did not like. She is absolutely pro-homosexual. She hates God. And God said of her and all who are like her, ” … all who hate me love death.” Proverbs 8:36. … Cindy’s blatant feminism is a direct affront to almighty God.”

Thomson has grown used to such characterizations by Benham over the years. “He feeds on this idea that folks that disagree with him are instruments of the devil, that sort of thing,” she said. “He dehumanizes people like me who don’t agree with him.”

Vicki Saporta, president and CEO of the National Abortion Federation, said popular opinion isn’t in favor of methods employed by Benham and OSA. “There isn’t public support for the kinds of activities he engages in. In fact, just the opposite is true,” said Saporta, who has debated Benham on TV and watched him block access to a San Diego abortion clinic during the 1996 Republican National Convention. “I think he hurts what he’s trying to accomplish through some of his tactics and activities.”

OSA’s methods “are powerful and they work,” Benham said. “I have no doubt she knows the battle” is won.

His detractors agree: Benham is charismatic and savvy. “I like the word ‘smarmy,'” said Jerry Bellow, an activist with Anti-Racist Action, a leftist group that led several counter-demonstrations in Jackson. “He comes off like a used car salesman in a lot of ways. Strategically, he’s very smart. He knows how to stay on message. He knows how to manage his resources.

“I think he comes off as really not very genuine in the way that he carries himself, a lot of times,” Bellow said. “Like, I wouldn’t buy a car from that man.”

Hearing the characterization, Benham laughs. “Jerry Bellow? The anarchist? He’s got lots of worse things he’s said to my face. That would be one of the kinder things he has said to me.”

This article appears in Jul 25 – Aug 1, 2006.