Republican presidential candidate Ben
Carson over the weekend denounced marriage equality and protections
for transgender people as “extra rights” for “a few people who
perhaps are abnormal.”
Speaking to the Catholic network EWTN's
Matthew Franck of the conservative Witherspoon Institute, Carson
warned that “our time is running out.”
“If we don't stand up for principles
now and we get a progressive [president] and they get two or three
Supreme Court picks, say goodbye to America,” Carson
said.
When Franck asked Carson what he would
do as president to make sure that federal funding will not be used to
“force districts to require girls to shower with boys” and
restore local control over education, Carson used the opportunity to
defend his opposition to LGBT rights, claiming that “political
correctness” was destroying America.
“You see how silly this is,” he
said. “I mean, it’s beyond ridiculous that you take the most
abnormal situation and then you make everyone else conform to it.
That doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. That’s one of the very
reasons that I have been an outspoken opponent of things like gay
marriage. I don’t have any problem with gay people doing anything
they want to do. You know, it’s a free country, there’s freedom
of association. However, when you now impose your value system on
everybody else and change fundamental definitions and principles of
society, I have a big problem with that. Everybody is equal,
everybody has equal rights, but nobody gets extra rights. And when we
start trying to impose the extra rights based on a few people who
perhaps are abnormal, where does that lead?”
Carson added that allowing gay couples
to marry could lead to plural marriages and called arguments for
transgender rights “garbage.”
“We are absolutely destroying
ourselves because we are paying attention to political correctness,”
he claimed.