Ben Carson, a Donald Trump surrogate
and former rival for the GOP presidential nomination, on Friday told
a conservative audience that marriage equality will lead to “mass
killings.”
Carson was a keynote speaker at the
Pensmore National Symposium on Religious Liberty at the College of
the Ozarks at Point Lookout near Branson, Missouri. The 2-day event
was co-sponsored by the American Family Association (AFA), a
Christian conservative group opposed to LGBT rights.
Government tyranny, Carson warned the
audience, would reign if they were not strong in their faith, which
would lead to “mass killings once again.”
“The peace that we experience now
will be a memory only,” Carson said. “This is the nation that
stands between peace and utter chaos.”
According to the Springfield
News-Leader, Carson was asked by reporters at a press
conference to expand on his thinking. He answered that allowing gay
couples to marry was “the camel's nose under the tent.”
“Why must they change [marriage]?”
Carson said. “I believe the reason is, if you can change the word
of God in one area, then you can change it in every area. It's the
camel's nose under the tent, and it will just be an avalanche of one
thing after the other.”
“We won't have anything that we can
use as our reference point because we will have thrown out God's
word. It'll be every man for himself, every man deciding for himself
what is right and what is wrong, and that can't possible lead to a
good place,” he added.
During his speech, Carson also
suggested that transgender people are confused.
“And, you know, the transgender
stuff. What do you think … that will do to our children in terms
of confusing them? You know for thousands of years, we've known what
a man is and what a woman is. And now all of the sudden we don't
know anymore. I mean how absurd. And where does that lead down the
road?” he said.