Matt Bevin: Founding Fathers ‘Very Involved’ In Cockfighting ‘And Always Have Been’


Matt Bevin, the hedge fund manager and Tea Party member who is running for Senate in Kentucky to knock off the Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, has a weird idea of how Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington and the other founders of the United States of America spent their free time.

“It’s interesting when you look at cockfighting and dogfighting as well,” said Bevin said in an interview on Louisville’s WHAS radio Thursday. “This isn’t something new, it wasn’t invented in Kentucky for example. I mean the Founding Fathers were all many of them very involved in this and always have been.”

Why would Bevin believe that the Founding Fathers were “very involved” in watching and presumably wagering on two male chickens pecking each other death?

Not to mention dogfighting.

Well, in all likelihood, Bevin was looking for some reason it was okay that he, himself delivered a speech to a rally organized to call for the legalization of cockifighting in Kentucky, where it is classified as a Class A misdemeanor offense.

On the federal level, the 2014 Farm Bill contains a provision that makes it illegal to be a spectator at a cockfighting event.

The rally attended by Matt Bevin was staged by a group calling itself the American Gamefowl Defense Network, which is dedicated to “unifying and uniting gamefowl enthusiasts around the principle of using the democratic process to change the law, not break the law.”

In other words, legalizing cockfighting.

But Matt Bevin said that he had no idea he was speaking at a pro-cockfighting rally. He claimed that he thought the was speaking at a “state’s rights rally.”

“I was the first person to speak and then I left,” Bevin said. “They knew I was here. They asked if I would be interested in speaking. I’m a politician running statewide, any chance I get to speak to a few hundred people I’m going to take it.”

“Only Matt Bevin would go to a cockfighting rally and claim he didn’t know what they were doing there,” said Allison Moore, McConnell’s spokesperson.

Bevin told WHAS radio that he has never attended a cockfight and that he does not “condone” cockfighting. But he supports “the First Amendment.”

“I’m going to defend the right of people to freely gather and discuss whatever they want to,” said Bevin.

The Humane Society of the United States on Thursday called on Matt Bevin to pull out of the race for McConnell’s senate seat.

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