Ben Carson won't apologize for his smears because it would 'destroy our nation'

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson refused to apologize for smearing transgender women during congressional testimony on Tuesday.

Rep. Jennifer Wexton (D-VA) gave Carson the chance to repudiate his remarks during a hearing of the House Financial Services Committee.

Carson, one of Trump’s longest-serving Cabinet members, also said, “I was relating a story that a women’s group told me about big hairy men, who are not transgender women, by the way, coming into their facility and having to be accepted because of the rules that were in place.”

“You don’t feel the need to apologize for those comments?” Wexton asked him

“No,” said Carson, adding, “I think you know this whole concept of political correctness — you can say this, you can’t say that, you can’t repeat what someone said — is total foolishness, and it’s going to destroy our nation, and we need to be more mature than that.”

The incident in question happened when Carson visited the HUD offices in San Francisco.

Carson “expressed concern about ‘big, hairy men’ trying to infiltrate women’s homeless shelters during an internal meeting, according to three people present who interpreted the remarks as an attack on transgender women,” the Washington Post reported in mid-September.

The bigoted commentary “visibly shocked and upset” much of the staff in HUD’s San Francisco office during his visit, according to the Post.

Carson has often made attacks against the LGBTQ community.

In his 2012 book, “America the Beautiful,” written before his entry into politics, Carson lamented that marriage equality could destroy the country like “the fall of the Roman Empire.”

“Marriage is between a man and a woman. No group, be they gays, be they NAMBLA, be they people who believe in bestiality, it doesn’t matter what they are. They don’t get to change the definition,” he told Fox News a year later.

After his failed presidential run, Carson was selected by Trump to serve as the head of HUD, despite the fact that his experience was as a surgeon and not anything to do with housing and real estate issues.

In congressional testimony earlier in the year, Wexton said Carson should resign for lying to Congress on behalf of Trump and called Carson “deceitful” and “inept.”

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.