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Ben Carson: Trans People Don’t Deserve ‘Extra Rights,’ Like Using Bathroom

CREDIT: YOUTUBE/FUSION
CREDIT: YOUTUBE/FUSION

A week after claiming his anti-gay positions didn’t make him homophobic, Ben Carson has suggested that transgender people should be segregated to their own separate restrooms.

Speaking with Fusion’s Jorge Ramos, Carson explained that he doesn’t think it’s fair that the only way to accommodate transgender people is with “extra rights” to make everyone else “uncomfortable.”

Answering a question about this week’s defeat of the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance, Carson suggested, “How about we have a transgender bathroom?”

“It is not fair for them to make everyone else uncomfortable,” he explained. “It’s one of the things that I don’t particularly like about the movement. I think everybody has equal rights, but I’m not sure that anybody should have extra rights — extra rights when it comes to redefining everything for everybody else and imposing your view on everybody else. The way that this country was designed, it was ‘live and let live,’ and that’s the way I feel.”

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He went on to say that “gay people can do anything they want,” except he still believes that marriage is between a man and a woman. Watch it:

Though many transgender people do prefer when a gender-neutral restroom is available for them to safely use, that isn’t what Carson was suggesting. Thursday afternoon, Twitter was rife with posts mocking the poll-leading presidential candidate for his antiquated “separate but equal” segregation proposal:

The idea of creating a separate restroom for transgender people to use was actually mocked on an episode of South Park last year.