After saying women who wear shorts deserve to be raped, pastor admits "I was wrong"
Pastor Bobby Leonard made the despicable comments in a resurfaced sermon from 2023
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In a sermon clip that’s gone viral online, Pastor Bobby Leonard, the head of Bible Baptist Tabernacle in Monroe, North Carolina, complained about how so many women today wear shorts and that he would sympathize with any men who sexually assaulted them.
The clip was first shared online by BadSermons, who regularly shares clips of preachers behaving badly.
… I told my wife, I said, “Mama… when we go to Pigeon Forge, to the outlet malls… you'll find more women going to have shorts on than you will with pants and dresses put together.”
So I sat there… I sat there in my car. I thought, “Okay, I want to see if that's right.” And I counted. Try that!
You’ll find more women go into those places with shorts than you will women with pants and dresses put together. Try it. If you got time, try it. Have your boy go there and try it. Just watch for it. Have your girl go there and watch for it.
And you know, I used to say this. I haven't said this in a long time. You ready? I said, “If you dress like that and you get raped, and I'm on the jury, he's going to go free.”
You don't like [that], do you? I'm right, though. I can't help it if you don't like it. I'm right. Because, you know, a man's a man. A man's a man.
When I was a boy, 85 years ago… 80 years ago… I don't even remember women wearing anything but dresses back then…
There’s no subtlety here. Leonard openly said a woman who wears shorts deserves to get raped and that even if he had the power to punish her assailant, he wouldn’t use it because “a man’s a man.”
Which says a lot about how horrible he thinks men are. (To be fair, if you had to live in this guy’s mind all day, you’d probably think men were awful too.)
Meanwhile, he freely admits spending his time sitting in parking lots in order to stare at women wearing shorts.
It’s also disturbing to hear him say that when he was a child, he only remembers women wearing dresses, because the implication is that women weren’t sexually assaulted back then. They were. To put it in words Leonard would understand, men were still men.
Don’t let the congregation off the hook either. It didn’t seem like anyone walked out when he said that.
If you think that clip is taken out of context—not that there’s any context in which what he said is okay—I’d love to show you the full sermon… except it was removed. The church appears to have taken down both its Facebook page and YouTube account since the clip began circulating. (The original sermon was delivered in August of 2023. I was able to obtain a full copy of it from BadSermons.)
None of this, unfortunately, is new. Just a few years ago, Paige Patterson, the former head of the Southern Baptist Convention, was under fire after we learned he encouraged women to stay with their abusive husbands because divorce would go against God’s will. When he was head of a theological seminary, he also told a woman who claimed she was raped not to tell the police and to forgive the rapist.
All that’s to say the whole “Well, what was she wearing?” crowd is well-represented in pulpits across the country.
On a side note, the son of a (different) preacher at Bible Baptist Tabernacle was once arrested for sex crimes involving children. So maybe the focus of these sermons should be on the criminals working at the church’s day care and not random women wearing shorts.
While the social media pages for the church were still down on Thursday, a picture circulated online of the marquee outside the building. Signed by Pastor Leonard, it read, “I am sorry for any hurt. I was wrong.”
That’s a start. It would be far more useful if Leonard publicly explained what he was wrong about.
Rape is entirely the fault of how women dress, because a man cannot reasonably be expected to have any control over his behavior? I will never understand why anyone would delegate their thinking to a member of the clergy, let alone a fool like this. I'm pretty sure the only thing he regrets here is being called out for what he said. I've little doubt but what he expects his religiosity to be deferred to at all times.
Men have ALWAYS thought like this and have been encouraged by their clergy to continue thinking that way, because it PROTECTS THE CLERGY.
"It's the woman's fault I [raped, beat, kicked, knifed, shot...] her."
"It's my wife's fault I cheated."
"It's my wife's fault I murdered her and all my children"
See, when you think like this, you can outlaw no-fault divorce, you can prevent pregnant women from getting a divorce, you can decide what is "legitimate" or "forcible" rape, and what isn't (i.e., a woman drinks too much or roofied and is raped while she's passed out, of COURSE that's her fault!).
I hope with everything in me that moderate Republican women are waking up to this (I'm starting to see pushback from Republicans on the Alabama IVF decision).