Ben Carson supports civil unions for homosexual couples. Ben Carson is wrong.
In the spring, after apologizing for correctly saying that being gay is a choice, he compounded his self-inflicted wound by declaring his support for ersatz homosexual couplings. “I support civil unions for gay couples,” said Carson, “and I have done so for many years.” He reiterated his support for civil unions after the Supreme Court ruling on sodomy-based marriage was released in June.
Dr. Ben Carson has been climbiCang the charts in recent polling data. He has pulled even with Donald Trump in one Iowa poll, and is second nationally in a number of other polls. His quiet, calm thoughtful demeanor is winning over voters who are looking for someone who is a political outsider and less frenetic than Trump.
This mandates a revisit by social conservatives of his views on homosexuality.
Carson’s fundamental problem here is that he is in favor of granting official legal and cultural approval to homosexual behavior. A civil union is identical to homosexual “marriage” in everything but name. All the same recognition, rights and privileges attach to civil unions as they do to same-sex “marriages.” But a rose by any other name is still a rose, and a homosexual union by any other name is still something immoral, unnatural and unhealthy.
Civil unions are problematic from a moral, medical and political point of view. From a moral standpoint, civil unions grant societal approval to behavior which God condemns. That alone should be a showstopper for Dr. Carson, but it isn’t.
From a medical point of view, civil unions promote behavior that has absolutely disastrous consequences for medical health. According to the Centers for Disease Control, homosexual behavior is riskier to human health even than intravenous drug abuse.
Men who have sex with men are at the highest risk of contracting HIV/AIDS, while men who shoot up with drugs have the second highest risk. Surely Dr. Carson, as one of the leading medical experts in the world, knows this, which makes his support for this kind of behavior disturbing at minimum and incomprehensible at worst.
As a medical professional who is committed to restoring human health in any way possible, he should be opposing the normalization of sodomy with every fiber of his being rather than looking for a way to accommodate it. As a medical doctor, he should no more support civil unions than he would support the normalization of IV drug abuse.
From a legal standpoint, recognition of homosexual civil unions will create all the same problems for society that homosexual marriages do, for bakers and florists and photographers and county clerks. It solves nothing.
And from a political standpoint, it pleases no one. Civil unions will not satisfy the homosexual lobby, because gay activists do not want half a loaf. They are insisting on the whole loaf, in addition to looking for ways to snatch any crumbs that may be left over for the socially conservative among us. They still want to silence, punish and marginalize anyone and everyone who opposes their agenda. Civil union status would not slow them down a bit. In fact, it would just infuriate them as something that, in their view, treats them as second-class citizens.
And civil unions will not please thinking evangelicals for the simple reason that civil unions approve of what God condemns. Evangelicals cannot support the normalization of adultery and fornication, and must not support the normalization of homosexual conduct for the same reason: it is a perversion of God’s design for human sexuality.
Civil unions appear to be a Solomonic effort to split the baby. Only in this instance the baby is actually severed rather than being saved. There is nothing of the wisdom of Solomon in this clumsy and unsatisfying hybrid.
Ben Carson is an understandably appealing candidate for evangelicals. He has been outspoken about his Christian faith, is an inspirational role model for all Americans, and had the courage to take on President Obama mano-a-mano at a national prayer breakfast.
But given his ambivalence on the subject of homosexual unions, this social conservative may have to think long and hard before supporting him for president.
