Cabler HGTV on Wednesday abruptly
reversed course on a reality show featuring anti-gay twin brothers
David and Jason Benham.
Flip It Forward, set to premiere
in October, featured the bothers as they helped families buy and sell
distressed properties for a profit.
The network announced on social media that it was
shelving the show.
“HGTV has decided not to move forward
with the Benham Brothers' series,” the
network said in a tweet to its more than 315,000 followers.
According
to Raw Story, which had contacted the network for comment, David
led and Jason helped organize a prayer rally outside the site of the
2012 Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Charlotte to protest
“abortion on demand,” “no-fault divorce,” “pornography and
perversion,” “adultery” and “demonic ideologies.”
During an appearance on Janet
Mefferd's radio show, David said the decision to hold the prayer
rally in Charlotte was based in part on voters in the county's
rejection of Amendment One, the state's constitutional amendment
which defines marriage as a heterosexual union.
“When Amendment One passed, I
realized the only three counties in North Carolina that actually
voted against the amendment were Charlotte, Raleigh and Asheville,
our three cities,” he said. “So we had all the rural areas and
all the suburban areas but we lost all the cities. So I felt like,
'Okay, it's time that we have a citywide church service of
repentance.' And that's the reason that we decided to do it right in
the heart of Charlotte the night before the DNC.”
David Benham also compared opposition
to marriage equality to efforts to defeat Nazi Germany.
“If evil is being accepted and
appreciated at the national level, aggressive Christian men must lead
the charge against it,” he wrote in a
2012 blog post on the website of Operation Save America. “In
the late 1940s, England realized this truth with Neville
Chamberlain’s Policy of Appeasement and the Nazi regime.
Chamberlain thought he could somehow 'appease' the fuehrer, yet
Winston Churchill aggressively stood against this policy and
proclaimed that they must kill Hitler and destroy the regime in its
entirety. It wasn’t long before Chamberlain’s 'politically
correct' policy fell flat on its face, and Churchill – the more
aggressive man – took the reins and joined America in defeating the
beast.”
In a Christian
Post op-ed, David Benham stated that gay men need to find
God.
“For the men on the other side of
this vote, I'll say a couple of things: You'll never find the love of
a father in the arms of another man. The emotional hurt that you've
experienced can only be healed through a life-giving relationship
with the very one that created you,” he wrote.
The bothers' successful real estate
business, Benham Companies, includes more than 100 offices in 35
states.