Conservatives have really gone to bat in defense of noted liar and likely sexual assailant Judge Brett Kavanaugh. The possibility of getting a majority on the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade is just so close and they won’t let anything like a little predation by a privileged white man get in the way!

While Kavanaugh himself denies being at the party or trying to sexually assault anyone, many of his supporters have been working on minimizing the assault as no big deal. One of the latest public members of the “Attempted Rape Is No Big Deal” club is extreme fundamentalist Baptist preacher Don Boys.

Boys has a long history of bigotry behind him. If you’re unfamiliar with him, he’s argued that Jesus would oppose raising the minimum wage, runs an Islamophobic website, and says Black people running South Africa is a greater injustice than apartheid.

Right Wing Watch notes that in his latest blog post, he gives supposedly “common sense definitions” to use when talking about Dr. Christine Blasey Ford saying Kavanaugh tried to rape her in high school.

Rape is having sex with a woman while she screams for help. No scream, no rape according to Deuteronomy 22:23-24. [Christine Blasey] Ford says Kavanaugh held his hand over her mouth so did she scream for help when his hand was elsewhere? After all, it was in a bedroom of a house; surely, one of the other 4 teens could have heard him scream when she bit his hand. Did she bite his hand? Poke him in the eye? Women know instinctively how to protect their honor: screaming, shouting, slapping, spitting, slugging, and stabbing with a finger, pencil, or hat pin. Since she did not cry out or stab him, I will not believe her without a film of the event.

It’s appalling that Boys would say this even if it isn’t surprising. It’s obvious that he thinks he is an authority on what rape truly is. What makes it even more astonishing is that these are the Bible verses he’s referring to, according to the New International Version Bible:

23 If a man happens to meet in a town a virgin pledged to be married and he sleeps with her, 24 you shall take both of them to the gate of that town and stone them to death—the young woman because she was in a town and did not scream for help, and the man because he violated another man’s wife. You must purge the evil from among you.

This isn’t about rape, but rather consensual sex. It’s arguing that the woman must have been a consenting party because she was in the city—where many people were around and could hear her—and chose not to fight. It isn’t to say that there must be screams for it to count as rape.

It’s worth noting that Boys didn’t go to the next two verses where there’s a call for killing rapists.

25 But if out in the country a man happens to meet a young woman pledged to be married and rapes her, only the man who has done this shall die. 26 Do nothing to the woman; she has committed no sin deserving death. This case is like that of someone who attacks and murders a neighbor,

HEY, EVEN THE BIBLE SAYS THE VICTIM ISN’T AT FAULT HERE. I am far from a scholar (it’s been a while since I went to Bible school), but this seems like a classic case of picking and choosing verses that can be twisted to his own liking. He does this again in the column, but, honestly, I’ve spent more than enough time absorbing his words. His column, in short, is a Christian fundamentalist version of every rape myth used to protect rapists.

While Boys’ defense of Kavanaugh isn’t particularly rare, it’s an example of just how hard conservatives are fighting to cast doubt at any cost. They’re using anything but the truth to support his confirmation. These aren’t just attacks on Dr. Ford or Ramirez; these are attacks on all survivors to send the message that their truth isn’t welcome and they should just put up and shut up.