Justin Parmenter: NC church whose pastor says women that wear shorts invite rape has received millions in public tax dollars for school vouchers
Justin Parmenter has been tracking some of the discriminatory schools collecting taxpayer-funded vouchers in North Carolina. Here’s one of the most egregious.
A Union County pastor is under fire for saying from the pulpit that he would not convict a rapist if his victim were wearing shorts. And if you’re a taxpayer in North Carolina, you are funding his organization.
Bobby Leonard started Bible Tabernacle Church in Monroe, NC in 1970. This week a clip of an August 2023 sermon by Leonard was shared on Twitter by @BadSermons:
“If you dress like that and you get raped, and I’m on the jury, he’s gonna go free…I can’t help if you don’t like it, I’m right. Cause, y’know, a man’s a man. A man’s a man.”
Under the leadership of Bobby Leonard, Bible Tabernacle Church opened a private school called Tabernacle Christian School in 1972. This school receives public tax dollars via the Opportunity Scholarship school voucher program which was created by the North Carolina General Assembly in 2014.
Tabernacle Christian School has received voucher dollars every school year since 2014-15 for a grand total of $3,649,766 in public taxpayer funds (that data available here).
In the past two years alone, Bobby Leonard’s organization has received nearly $2,000,000 ($902,315 in 2023-24 and $923,328 in 2022-23).