Trump’s HUD Secretary Ben Carson is attending anti-LGBT conference

Illustrated rainbow pride flag on a white background.

Donald Trump’s Housing and Urban Development Secretary Dr Ben Carson is reportedly speaking to a global conference of anti-LGBT activists in Hungary.

Dr Carson, a long-time opponent of LGBT rights, is reportedly set to attend the World Congress of Families (WCF) event in Hungary later this week.

The annual event is attended by anti-gay activists from around the world, and a press release for this year pledges the “launch a new global pro-family alliance of countries dedicated to defending marriage [and] the family”.

The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that Trump cabinet member Dr Carson will be speaking at the event, though the topic of his talk is not listed.

Ben Carson

At last year’s event in Moscow, WCF delegates backed the roll-out of Russia-style ‘gay propaganda’ laws.

The resolution called for “the adoption of legislative bans on all types propaganda concerning homosexual relationships” in order to “uphold the interests of children” across the world.

It also supported legislation around the world to ban same-sex adoption, calling for people to study “the negative social and psychological effects of raising children in same-gender couples”.

Despite failing to halt LGBT rights in the United States, the US-based leadership of the WCF has turned its sights to pushing anti-LGBT laws in countries which do not have a strong gay lobby, and in enabling resistance to equality laws across the world.

One of the key figures in the WCF is Brian Brown – the head of the US-based National Organisation for Marriage and a bitter opponent of LGBT equality.

Dr Carson was appointed by Trump despite his long history of homophobic remarks, comparing gay people to paedophiles and insisting that prisons ‘prove’ being gay is a choice.

During his confirmation hearing he doubled down on his past comments, attacking “extra rights” or gay people.

The Republican previously insisted that same-sex marriage is a Marxist plot from the New World Order, claiming in a speech to a listed anti-LGBT hate group that gay weddings are part of a plan “to destroy unity [and] bring America down.”

Carson previously claimed that gay people were responsible for the fall of the Roman Empire, warned that “there will be mass killings once again” over same-sex marriage, and insisted that gay weddings are like car seats for conjoined twins.

He has also claimed equal marriage is a Marxist plot created by the ‘New World Order’.

Speaking at an event for the anti-LGBT National Organisation for Marriage, he claimed “[America’s] strength lies in our unity. And there are so many forces that are there to try to destroy that unity —the only way to bring America down.

“If you look in a lot of writings of the Neo-Marxists when they talk about the New World Order, they say there’s only one stick in the mud: how do you get them out of the way and how do you change them?

“They said there were two things: their Judeo-Christian faith, and their strong families. Those were the things that had to be attacked, and those things have been systematically attacked.

“There’s a book called the Naked Communist… it lays out the whole agenda of how to attack the family and the Judeo-Christian values, to weaken the structure of America.

“This stuff is not secret, you can read about it. You can see all the things that are happening in America today.”

He continued later: “When we talk about liberty and justice for all, doesn’t that mean that people can be left alone, that no-one else gets to change definitions on them and change life for them?”

“They have no right to say to me that I must change the way I think in order to accommodate what they believe.

“That’s where the injustice comes from, and we have to understand that.”