Ben Carson seems to be taking the Republican National Convention by storm. Before insinuating that Hillary Clinton is down with Lucifer during his key-note speech Tuesday, Carson delivered another hot take. During an interview with The Hill, former neurologist and ex-Donald Trump combatant said he just doesn’t get being transgendered, equating it to someone wanting to change their ethnicity:
“For someone to wake up and think that they belong to a different sex because they feel different that day is the same as if you woke up and said, ‘I’m Afghani today because I saw a movie about that last night, and even though my genetics might not indicate that, that’s the way I feel, and if you say that I’m not, then you’re a racist.’”
It’s an interesting soundbite from someone who was a practicing doctor, but Carson said it’s just rational thinking and society has become too politically correct:
“It’s the same kind of situation. What we ought to do is utilize our brains, utilize our common sense as human beings. We’ve known what men are and what women are for thousands of years. So we don’t know anything, everything is relative — this doesn’t make any sense.”
Carson has made other controversial comments about the LGBTQ community in the past and has opposed the idea of transgender bathrooms. The retired neurosurgeon, who dreams of a time when people wouldn’t complain about being attacked by a bear, takes issue with how some are even considering making transgender rights into a civil rights issue:
“Anytime the secular progressives want to get people on their side, they go back to the civil rights movement, and they say this is a civil rights issue and it’s not a civil rights issue. But we have to be willing to stand up, we have to be willing to call out people for this absolutely ridiculous stuff that they’re trying to put over on us, that they’re trying to put over on our children.”
Carson even evoked the old “leopard can’t change its spot” anecdote as support, an interesting source of evidence to use. After a period of relative inactivity, Carson is speaking out everywhere during the RNC, and who knows what he’ll say next.