Tijdens Vans Warped Tour in 2013 maakte Memphis May Fire-zanger Matty Mullins een opmerking over de ‘sletterige’ manier waarop jonge vrouwen zich kleedden op het festival. De opmerking viel niet in goede aarde bij verschillende aanwezige festivalgangers. Daarnaast werd Mullins flink onderuit gehaald door bands als The Amity Affliction en The Wonder Years. De zanger heeft echter nu, twee jaar later, in een recent interview met the BadChristian podcast aangegeven zijn woorden terug te nemen:

“I was kinda at a weird time in my life—not that that’s an excuse for it at all—but I didn’t think so much about what I was saying before I said it,” he says. “I had good intentions; I think that my intentions were of the Spirit, but my words were of the flesh. Does that makes sense? I made a comment about the way that girls were dressing at Warped Tour to remind them to respect themselves, and [subsequently] had a huge uproar of people that were offended by the comment.

Later voegde hij toe:

”Like I said, I chose the wrong words. I could’ve come at it with a different set of words that, I think, would’ve had a totally different response. I think there still would’ve been some backlash too, but choosing to use words that are considered slut-shaming wasn’t the best choice. The message I should’ve gotten across was, ‘You can dress however you want and I’m not going to treat you any differently.’ Jesus loves you anyway. But I guess I come at it from a different perspective because I’ve been married for nine years now, and I look at my wife and how special she is to me and our intimate relationship and how specific that is to us, so when you think of people offering that part of themselves up to the world before thy have a chance to offer it up to one person for the rest of their life, I have a heart for that; to tell people that they don’t need to do that; that it can be different; that it can be beautiful; it can be special and individual to them. So that’s where I was coming from and I just said it the wrong way.”

Luister hieronder naar de volledige podcast.