Operation Rescue Leader Upsets Va. Town -- Benham Is Jailed Over Protest Tactics Outside High School

LYNCHBURG, Va. - The Rev. Philip "Flip" Benham was about to eat his 17th jailhouse lunch here: a hamburger and mashed potatoes, chocolate milk, beans, corn and a cookie. "The food is good," he said.

Benham knows jails. As the national director of Operation Rescue National, he has been in several, arrested after protests at abortion clinics and doctors' homes, and also at Barnes & Noble bookstores and even Disney World.

But he will get to know the Lynchburg jail better than any other. On Feb. 18, much to his surprise, he got a sentence of six months after leading a demonstration outside a high school.

He and 150 Liberty University students carried gruesome posters picturing aborted fetuses and told arriving high-school students, including a busload of physically and mentally handicapped teenagers, that they were going to Hell if they didn't save unborn babies and accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior.

Preaching to the converted?

This is a conservative town. This is the Rev. Jerry Falwell's headquarters; he was born and brought up here, preaches at the Thomas Road Baptist Church and started Liberty University nearby.

The mayor, James Whitaker, runs a Christian bookstore when he isn't at City Hall. But neither of them liked it when Benham and two young supporters, John Reyes and Jeffrey Brown, brought the protesters to E.C. Glass High School last November.

The protest was part of a campaign called "God is Going Back to School," which is one of several "Going to the Gates" protests.

Benham is expanding Operation Rescue's targets to include broader cultural issues such as pornography and homosexuality, issues he says represent profound moral decay. But the effort, if what's happening here is any indication, might be falling a little flat.

"E.C. Glass High School is not the gates of Hell," said Commonwealth's Attorney William Petty, who successfully brought the case of trespassing against Benham. "There is no public support for what happened there."

Falwell has condemned the way this protest was conducted, while still supporting the cause. Falwell paid the $700 cost of police overtime to handle the demonstration. He has refused to support a series of "Release Flip Benham!" rallies.

Although Operation Restore Liberty organizers are promising crowds will descend on this city to picket the judge, prosecutor and school superintendent, 60 showed up recently. About 75 went to an evening church rally.

Doing God's work

Benham says the law of man is subordinate to the law of God, and he is utterly confident of his interpretation of what God wants.

"Much of the New Testament was written in jail, you know," he says. The sheriff has refused to allow reporters access to Benham in jail, so he calls them collect when he has a chance at the phone.

But he won't admit that he really doesn't have to be in jail at all.

Benham came to Lynchburg last November mostly because his twin sons, Jason and David, are seniors at Liberty University. Falwell invited Benham to speak at Thomas Road Baptist Church, and that evening Benham held an informal session with students at the college. He invited them to "take a stand" at Glass High School the next morning with him, Reyes and the Benham boys, both baseball players on full athletic scholarships. Benham says he expected about 20 to appear at 6 a.m.; instead, he says, 300 showed up. Police say it was about 150.

Police and school officials asked Benham to take the LU students off school property, and he says he complied. Benham and Reyes maintain their troops did nothing more than "witness" or sing.

Others dispute that, saying some LU students entered the school and harangued high-schoolers, blocked entrances and scared the handicapped students. School officials and students were insulted to be thought of as hellbent, godless murderers of the unborn.

City officials were outraged at what they saw as a kind of assault, and argued the safety of the high school had been violated.

Petty asked a grand jury to indict them on charges of trespassing, parading without a permit and disorderly conduct on school property. They were arrested and released on $2,500 bond, and waived a jury trial.

Protests raise his profile

Benham does not say that expanding his activities to protests at bookstores or Disney World is a way to get the attention that provides the lifeblood of his organization. He says the books he deems pornographic, and Disney's policy of extending insurance benefits to homosexual partners, must be met with the same fierce defiance as abortion. He got 100 people to join him protesting Disney, and media coverage across the country.

Since the sentencing in Lynchburg a month ago, Benham and his supporters have portrayed his incarceration as a free-speech issue, an imprisonment for what he said rather than what he did. His enemies, however, see Benham as a true believer trying to revive a dying institution, rallying his troops to a martyr's cause.

"The schools campaign was a flop. They have not mobilized people," said Vicki Saporta, director of the National Abortion Federation (NAF). "This is to expand their profile and visibility . . . When localities don't enforce trespassing laws, violence tends to escalate."

He will probably serve at least three months, Lynchburg law-enforcement officials say. However, Reyes, his co-defendant, is out of jail and is appealing his conviction. Reyes is continuing his studies and his protests, and through a separate lawsuit has succeeded in getting the City Council to abandon its policy of requiring a permit for demonstrations.

But Benham said he chose not to appeal. He said the reason was that under the judge's ruling he would have had to stay in Lynchburg for an unknown number of months until the appeal was heard, and he couldn't afford to do that.

But Commonwealth's Attorney Petty said the judge did not make that order, nor did Petty ask him to. In fact, in similar misdemeanor cases other defendants have gotten permission to leave the state during their appeals.