Pastor Flip Benham, who appeared alongside other anti-abortion advocates at a press conference with Moore last week, suggested Monday on an Alabama radio show that there was nothing wrong with dating younger women, saying that Moore never did so without their parents’ permission.

“The lady that he’s married to now, Ms. Kayla, is a younger woman. He did that because there is something about a purity of a young woman, there is something that is good, that’s true, that’s straight and he looked for that,” Benham told radio hosts Matt Murphy and Andrea Lindenberg in an interview first highlighted by the liberal media watchdog Right Wing Watch.