The Ricochet Podcast - CPAC #15: The Benham Brothers

Episode Date: February 28, 2015

National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke talks to reality TV stars the Benham Brothers about cultural forces that caused the cancellation of their popular TV show from HGTV. Source

This is Charles Cook for National Review here at CPAC. I'm here with the Benham Brothers. I actually wrote about you guys a while ago when the whole HGTV situation flared up. And as you can hear, I'm not from the United States originally. And I say to people who ask me about speech in this country, it's not really the government you have to worry about at the moment. It's market pressures. It's advocacy groups. So what's it been like? Well, it's been quite a wild ride.

I mean, Jason and I, we're the first guys to say HGTV had every right in this country to fire us if they wanted to. That's okay. We have nothing against them. But you're correct in saying that the market pressures right now and the coercion that's happening in the marketplace, it's not the right to believe. It's the right to voice your beliefs with your freedom of speech that's coming under pressure right now. And Jason and I wrote in our book, Whatever the Cost, that if we don't, first of all, as Christians, stand up for what we believe, whatever the cost. That's a tenet of our faith. But secondly, as Americans, these freedoms that we have,

especially the freedom of speech and the freedom of expression, freedom of religion, we have to stand up for those, whatever the cost. So it's been exciting to see how many people are hungry for courage in America, but it's also been very scary to see the onslaught and the attacks that are happening in the marketplace right now. So from what I could see, the comments that were made really had nothing to do with the show you guys were working on. You didn't make it on the show. You didn't make it on their channel. You didn't make it under the guise of HGTV. It was a group found comments that you had made elsewhere, if I'm correct. And then, yes, I should probably go through this.

So a group found comments that you had made in other spheres and then tried to get a show you were working on cancelled at HGTV, and HGTV cancelled the show, that's right. That's right, but here's the interesting thing. That group didn't find any comments that HG hadn't found a year prior. There was nothing new. HG had already approached us, talked with us about it. Hey guys, we want to talk about your beliefs. Are you anti-gay?

And are you anti-women? So we got a chance to speak to them specifically about our beliefs, which are from the Judeo-Christian tradition. And they said, you know what? You guys aren't haters. You're good dudes. We want you on our show. And so whenever they made the announcement five weeks into our filming, they made an announcement in New York City that our show was going to be a real deal and it was coming on in October. That's when one of the advocacy groups spoke up and said, wait a second, these guys are terrible people. And HG said that they were going to stick with us. And because of that,

there was an article printed that pulled in some of those old things that we said, but then pitched them in a way and added in other comments and painted us in a very bad narrative. And that's what scared HGTV and caused them to pull the show. And by the way, I have to add, we were speaking in the context of a prayer service, in the context of 2 Chronicles 7.14, which is a Bible verse that talks about the church and Christians repenting so that the sins of the nation can be healed. So this is something that is very Christian of us to do. It was not an anti-gay rally or any of these other things that they're characterizing it as.

So what do you think the biggest threat is for others like you at the moment? I mean, do you feel as if you just happen to be singled out and there are many other people who could also be fired at a moment's notice? Or do you think that this was just the product of a misinterpretation or of a collection of threats? Yeah, no, this wasn't a misinterpretation of anything. This is a concerted effort by a bully agenda to silence, first of all, men and women of faith,

but second of all, anyone that would speak against any type of its issues. For instance, gay marriage. It doesn't matter whether you're Christian or not. If you don't support it and celebrate it, you're going to be coerced. And what we're seeing now, especially with a lot of these transgender bills that are coming, these non-discrimination

bills coming into different cities, and we're fighting one in Charlotte right now, they're forcing business owners, not only can you not discriminate against a particular type of message, but you can't discriminate against a particular type of an event. Jason and I, we would be the first guys to say, if a gay-owned apparel company received a bulk order for t-shirts from the Westboro Baptists that says, God hates gays, they don't have to print those shirts. If I'm a gun range owner and someone says, I want to use your gun range because I'm training to go to support ISIS, you don't have to service him. So you don't have to, as a business owner, service all requests and produce all messages and endorse all messages. It's against our conscience. So they're using it now. This coercion is a very real thing that didn't

just happen to us, but it's happened on all over the country. And what we can see is when you asked what's the biggest threat right now, religious liberty, that's what we see. I mean, it's the freedom to worship God and to allow that to manifest itself through your actions. So our founding fathers, they believed there was a God. They believed that our rights came from Him and that government's job was to protect those rights. That was it.

But when you remove God from the equation, now all of a sudden rights become a variable. The rights become a variable because they're now given to us from the government. If they're given to us from the government and not God, then the government can take those rights. So what happens then is we don't need to focus as much on rights as we do responsibilities because when our rights are taken away, we still have a responsibility to speak for what's true

and to speak our consciences, even if the government is saying you don't have that right. Where did the support come from? I know that there was the press picked up on this story. There was some condemnation on various blogs. It became a national story for a couple of days. The CNN, I think I saw you guys on. And then it disappeared.

So if you could just explain what happened next and where the support or the hatred came from. Yeah, well, at first, the only hatred that came was from that original post from Right Wing Watch. And there were about 2,000 comments made on HGTV's Facebook page. Then an overwhelming amount of support. We were on the Fox channels. We were on CNN. Our media report showed 51 million tweets about our story over a two-week period. And what's interesting is an overwhelming majority,

the high 90 percentile of those were all positive in support of us, and many came from the LGBT community. That's interesting. So you think that's because they recognize the principles that you're talking about, rather than, because clearly they disagree with you. Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. They for sure disagree with us, but thank the Lord that those folks recognize that when you kill off one side of any debate, all intellectual progress ceases.

And so they recognize, just like Alan Combs, we've been on his show several times. I told him, I said, you know, Alan, I want to thank you for not trying to silence the other side. For bringing on so many people that think the opposite of you because you know that as we sharpen each other in the realm of ideas that's how we move forward intellectually so what's next for you both well the book that's out yeah we've got the book that's out whatever the cost and you can buy that where any anywhere books are sold but i mean we're entrepreneurs we're job creators so we're trying to create as many jobs as we can and expand the tax base um we're family guys i've got five kids he has four.

So we're doing that. And then we're men of faith. We're speaking in churches. We're trying to get Christians to be involved in our culture and not to just sit silently by. And we're also encouraging our political leaders to stand strong on principles. George Washington's quote that we love,

he said, of all the political actions and dispositions that lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indisputable. And it's so vital that we really take a stand on principle today. And how's the reaction been here at CPAC? It's been great. I tell you, we feel like everybody here is 100% with us. And we love that because you know what? The majority of America is. There's a small minority that's not. And that's the one that happens to be controlling a lot of the media. Well, thank you very much for your time.

Thanks for having us. Thank you. Great.