Ben Carson: Apologizing for Anti-Gay Comments Would “Destroy Our Nation”

A former competitor for the Republican nomination, Ben Carson has now been one of the longest serving Trump administration members. Despite a mini scandal over his office spending $31,000 on a table, he has had a relatively quiet run as the Chair of Housing and Urban Development.

In September, though, Carson was accused of making derogatory comments about transgender people during a HUD meeting. When asked about the comments during a congressional hearing on Tuesday, the former surgeon refused to apologize.

During the September meeting, the HUD chief reportedly said that “big hairy men” were attempting to enter women’s bathrooms.

A source who was at the meeting said, “His overall tone is dismissive and joking about these people. It’s disrespectful of the people we are trying to serve.”

Carson was asked by Representative Jennifer Wexton (D-VA), “You don’t feel the need to apologize for those comments?”

The HUD director painted the situation as a misunderstanding. “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,” he said.

Carson then blasted the idea of apologizing due to political correctness. He continued, “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.”