Benham Blues Are Your Blues, Too

Here we go again. Having just come off the Brendan Eich scandal—the scandal being that Mozilla essentially fired him—and not long after the Phil Robertson flap, we now have the Benham brothers, David and Jason, a pair of evangelical Christian real estate developers, under commercial assault for publicly voicing a biblical moral stance. Get used to it.

HGTV had plans for a television show in which the Benham twins would “leverage their good-natured sibling rivalry to help families find a fixer-upper and transform it into the dream home they never thought they could afford.” But the network dropped the idea just two days after the liberal activist group Right Wing Watch raised a ruckus over the Benhams’ statements and activities opposing same-sex marriage and abortion. Seven days later, Atlanta-based SunTrust Bank decided to end its business relationship with the brothers, though by the end of the next day SunTrust reversed its decision. David Benham remarked, “Keeping us off television wasn’t enough, now this agenda to silence wants us out of the marketplace.”