The latest darling of the Tea Party says that gays, pedophiles, “people who believe in bestiality,” and “NAMBLA” don’t get to “redefine” marriage. Dr. Ben Carson, who came to national attention when he delivered a speech earlier this year at the National Prayer Breakfast, shared with Fox News’ Sean Hannity his “thoughts … that marriage is between a man and a woman, it’s a well-established fundamental pillar of society.”
“No group, be they gays, be they NAMBLA [the North American Man/Boy Love Association], be they people who believe in bestiality, it doesn’t matter what they are, they don’t get to change the definition. So it’s not something that’s against gays, it’s against anybody who wants to come along and change the fundamental definitions of pillars of society. It has signifcant ramifications.”
Dr. Carson is a neurosurgeon and the director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland — one of, if not the top hospitals in the world. This means that Dr. Ben Carson literally is a brain surgeon, and proves that bigotry and ignorance are like a virus — they know neither race nor intellect, and unlike their host, they don’t discriminate.
Over at Think Progress, Adam Peck writes:
The segment ended shorty afterward, leaving Hannity with no time to clarify whether Carson, himself a black man, would have also been opposed to the 1967 Supreme Court ruling in Loving v. Virginia, a decision that redefined the same “fundamental pillar of society†as something that could not be inhibited by race.
Carson’s comments also puts him at odds with every major medical association in the country. Both the American Medical Association’s code of conduct and the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic Statistical Manual contain strong and unambiguous language on homosexuality as neither a medical nor psychological condition but rather a perfectly healthy and biologically-rooted lifestyle, and remain critical of anyone who suggests otherwise.
He is also far from the first Republican to equate homosexuality to things like pedophilia. Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, state lawmakers and conservatives everywhere have all sought to paint the LGBT community and pedophiles with the same brush, even as their own party is pulled in the direction of equality.
Of course, professional backlash has been swift. Media Matters reports:
“I don’t think most people at Hopkins think what he says on this subject matters,” Professor Todd Shepard, co-director of the university’s Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, said in a statement toMedia Matters. “They make him look nasty, petty, and ill-informed. It doesn’t tell us anything about his amazing abilities as a surgeon. It does remind us, however, that those abilities do not mean we should listen to what he says in any other domain.”
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Baltimore Sun media critic David Zurawik wrote that Fox had “created a climate” for Carson’s “partisan, polarizing and possibly hurtful language.”
Shepard, who teaches French history as well as gender and sexuality studies, compared Carson to the French intellectuals who supported the prosecution of Alfred Dreyfus at the turn of the 20th century.
“I admire Dr. Carson as a neurosurgeon, but his intervention into this debate proves that, like those who defended the Army and the Church against Dreyfus, he prefers to defend the ways things have been rather than individual rights and to deny that informed and rational debate is a better basis for making decisions than received wisdom,” said Shepard. “I doubt that he would apply these lessons to his professional life. In this case, where he knows nothing more than hearsay, the good doctor is wrong about the history.”
Shepard concluded that these “reactionary and rancid claims do remind us of how far the general discussion has advanced beyond Dr. Carson and his far-right audience.”
In early February at the National Prayer Breakfast, Dr. Carson stood next to President Barack Obama and unleashed a ludicrous diagnosis of the economy and America’s woes, which apparently include “political correctness.”
Slate’s Dave Weigel notes that in Carson’s book, he “spends a little time explaining why marriage shouldn’t be redefined to include same-sex unions.”:
“I have no problem whatsoever,” he writes, “with allowing gay people to live as they please, as long as they don’t try to impose their lifestyle on everyone else. Marriage is a very sacred institution and should not be degraded by allowing every other type of relationship to be made equivalent to it.”
Up to now, across a series of friendly profiles, nobody thought to ask Carson about marriage. The first time someone did, he took a sharp turn into Gaffe City.
Ironically, Dr. Carson’s latest book is America the Beautiful: Rediscovering What Made This Nation Great. Equating gays to NAMBLA, pedophiles, and “people who believe in bestiality,” we’re certain, isn’t part of what made America great, and diminishes both Dr. Carson and his employer.
http://mediamatters.org/embed/193282