While discussing how unmarried American families, bad leadership, and "pushing things like transgenderism" are "having a very deleterious effect" on children, former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Ben Carson told Newsmax on Thursday, "If this country goes down, I guarantee the rest of the world goes down, too."
Dr. Carson, a professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, explained his position on "Carl Higbie FRONTLINE" in response to a Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau data released last week; it showed that one of every four Americans has never been married by age 40. The number recorded in 1980 was 6%.
"It's a very serious problem," Carson said. "[Former President] Ronald Reagan said that the American family is the cornerstone of our society, and a lot of our enemies, particularly our Marxist enemies, have said in the past that our faith and our families are our Achilles' heel. That's the area that you can attack to bring America down, and there's been a lot of that going on."
As for why the number is so high, Carson said, "Our children are not seeing good examples anymore.
"They used to grow up with traditional nuclear families. You just aren't seeing that, and over 35% of children by the age of 16 have lived in a household where there was cohabitation as opposed to marriage," he said. "If this is becoming the norm for them, it's probably a pattern that they're going to repeat.
"And then we see faith being thrown out completely, morality ... the very concepts that our country was built on," he continued. "We're teaching our young people that all of our principles were wrong, and we're actually pretty evil people. All of this is having a very deleterious effect, and I think those of us who know better have to be very aggressive.
"We can't passively sit by and just complain about what's going on because there's too much at stake."
Carson said that if the U.S. is going to fix the problem, "We're going to need some leadership. This is something that's sorely missing right now. We need people who can inspire people to do the right thing."
The former HUD secretary cited Hollywood as one of too many influences that do "the wrong thing." "Who does Hollywood put up? These people who are jumping from bed to bed, from relationship to relationship, there's just no emphasis on establishing a family. And 40% of babies in this country are now born out of wedlock," he said.
"Many statistics have shown us that children who come from a nuclear family, with a father and a mother, do much better than those who come from other circumstances."
He said another contributor to the increasing trend of unmarried, 40-year-old Americans — of which 46% are Black, according to the Pew analysis — are the Great Society programs of former President Lyndon B. Johnson, nearly 60 years ago.
"We started creating policies that actually rewarded some of the women for having babies out of wedlock, and punished them if you brought another person into the household who was earning an income.
"When I was secretary ... there were a lot of people up on the Hill who were not sympathetic to my wanting to change that. They wanted to keep people in that situation, he said. "[We] have to have a critical mass of legislators and executive branch people who understand the importance to our society — to our existence — for these things.
"Here we are, pushing things like transgenderism and things that ultimately lead to the extinction of society. We're just not thinking," he continued. "This is not to say that we should be mean to anybody. Everybody gets equal rights, but nobody gets extra rights. We've got to start thinking logically and not just being carried away by fanciful thought."
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