Ben Carson: “Children Raised By Single Parents End Up Poor And Become Criminals”

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Ben Carson, GOP presidential candidate, calling for a focus on families with “traditional, intact values,” said Wednesday that not “every lifestyle is exactly of the same value,” and attacked what he called the “p.c. police.”

“We have got to stop paying attention to the ‘p.c. police,’ who say every lifestyle is exactly of the same value,” Carson said in a radio interview with Sirius XM. “No, it’s not of the same value. It is very clear that intact, traditional families with traditional, intact values do much better in terms of raising children. So let’s stop pretending that everything is of equal value.”

Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, argued that children born out of wedlock or raised by single parents are tied to higher rates of poverty and crime. “We need to face the fact that when young girls have babies out of wedlock, most of the time their education ends with that first baby,” Carson said. “And those babies are four times as likely to grow up in poverty, end up in the penal system or the welfare system. You know, I’m not making this stuff up. That’s well-documented. That’s a problem.”

Carson has continually railed against what he sees as a decline in traditional values and family structures, particularly when discussing problems facing the black community. He said during a visit to New York’s Harlem in August that to address urban violence, “we need to be talking about, ‘How do we instill values into people again?’ And those are family and faith.”

Carson, the only black candidate running for president in either party, has pointed fingers at “the hip-hop community” for damaging the black community. He also has dismissed the Black Lives Matter movement as “silly” and “divisive” and has called the distinction between saying “black lives matter” and “all lives matter” a product of “political correctness going amuck.”