Copyright Salt Lake City Deseret News
Look at the social media accounts of Dr. Ben Carson, and you won’t find just Dr. Ben Carson. The neurosurgeon, former GOP presidential candidate and former U.S. Housing and Urban Development secretary shares his social media accounts with his wife, Candy. She’s credited on the cover of many of his books, too. In fact, it’s hard to find a public-facing place where the couple are apart. That’s by design. The Carsons, who will be honored by the Sutherland Institute Friday at its 30th anniversary awards dinner, are among the most prominent voices speaking out on behalf of the American family, an institution they champion in the 2024 book “The Perilous Fight.” And it is their own strong union that compelled the Sutherland Institute to present its Family Values Award to both of the Carsons together, said Rick Larsen, the institute’s president and CEO. “We find it remarkable that in public life, there are so few people of (Dr. Carsons’) standing and profile who will unapologetically defend the family as a core institution and make the connection with families of faith,” Larsen said, Thursday, explaining why Sutherland initially considered Ben Carson alone as a recipient. But then, looking closer at “The Perilous Fight” and other books, the Sutherland team realized how important Candy Carson is to the work. “When you read their book, and when you read Candy’s book, ‘A Doctor in the House‚’ you realize they’re inseparable, they’re in this together.” And so we adjusted the award to recognize both of them," Larsen said. Speaking to the Deseret News in advance of his speech Wednesday at Utah Valley University, Dr. Carson said, “We’ve been married for 50 years, and I can’t even imagine life without my wife.” But earlier in his professional life, they weren’t able to work together as much as they do now. “I was incredibly busy as a pediatric neurosurgeon, and when I took over as director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins, the Hopkins pediatric neurosurgery division was not well known. ... They hadn’t accomplished a lot that people knew about, and so I was spending a lot of hours to get us to the point where, from 1984 when I became director, to 2008 when U.S. News and World Report named us the No. 1 pediatric neurosurgery division,” Carson said. “It took a lot of work, and during all that time, she was a fantastic mother, taking care of our children. And, you know, she had an advanced degree, she had a Yale degree, and she had an MBA as well. She put all that aside to really focus on our children,” he said. At the same time, Candy Carson was starting the Carsons Scholars Program, which awards college scholarships to students who excel academically and serve their communities. And over time, she came to be a collaborator on his books. “In today’s political environment, if you talk about families or communities of faith, those are surprisingly controversial. Sutherland has defended faith and family for the past 30 years, and we haven’t defended them on a political basis, or on an ideological basis. We’ve defended them because the data says intact families in communities of faith tend to thrive. The data says that. And history says that,” Larsen said. “So we’re completely aligned with Dr. Carson and Candy Carson’s new book where they make those points, that these are the solutions to many of society’s problems.” Dr. Carson will be presenting the keynote address at the Sutherland Institute’s awards dinner Friday. At the same event, the George Sutherland Award will be presented to Judge Thomas B. Griffith. Why is the fight for families ‘perilous’? In their most recent book, the Carsons explain that the title came from a line in “The Star-Spangled Banner,” written by Francis Scott Key to describe the British bombardment of Fort McHenry during the War of 1812. Like Fort McHenry, the Carsons write, “the American family is under heavy bombardment and sustained attack. Our enemies have been chipping away at their target for decades, and they now believe the time is right for a full-scale assault.” To some, Ben Carson might seem an unlikely defender of the traditional, two-parent family. After all, he rose to the heights of medicine and governance without what has been called “two-parent privilege.” His father left the home when he and his brother were children, and his mother, who had gotten married at age 13, at times worked two and sometimes three jobs to support her sons. Sonya Carson, despite having only a grade-school education, was determined that her sons succeed. In one of the poignant stories Ben Carson has told about her, Sonya Carson required her sons to write two book reports to give her every week. It was only later in life that he realized she was unable to read the reports her boys gave her. But it was the lack of a father in the home and the hardships that this put on his mother and her sons that helped Carson realize how important a strong, two-parent family is in the life of a child. “I wondered so often what it would be like to have a father in our home. Someone to wrestle with. Someone to teach me all the things I wanted to learn. Someone to show me what it meant to be a man,” he writes in “The Perilous Fight.” He goes on: “The memory of my own childhood lack was a huge motivator for doing things well as we raised our own children and established our own family bonds.” For example, the couple made the decision to delay having children until he was finished with his medical residency, which sometimes demanded a 100-hour workweek. “We had a vision for the health of our home that was incompatible with a loving but absent father,” the Carsons write. Why the family is under attack The Carsons believe that the institution of the family is being deliberately undermined by modern-day Marxists, socialists and globalists whose values are at odds with those of America’s founders. They cite the 1958 book “The Naked Communist,” written by former FBI agent and Latter-day Saint W. Cleon Skousen, who argued against communism and put forth the movement’s 45 strategies that some believed would result in “the ideological capture of America.” Among them: “Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce” and “emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents.” The assault on the family is ongoing through the entertainment media and through liberal forces in education, the Carsons believe, at the same time that religious faith — another component of strong families — is also experiencing erosion. The Carsons are not 100% convinced this new “perilous fight” can be won, but they offer strategies that give families a fighting chance. Among them: They advocate for public policies that strengthen and grow families (such as streamlining the adoption process and making it more affordable), divorce laws that incentivize staying married and punish fathers who abandon their children. Speaking to the Deseret News in Orem on Wednesday, Dr. Ben Carson said that Tuesday’s election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York was no surprise given the “45 goals of communism” agenda that the Carsons write about in “The Perilous Fight.” “Socialism wants the government to be No. 1 in your life from cradle to grave, and in order to accomplish that, you know, they create divisions, and they don’t want to have a strong family structure. In fact, if you’re very familiar with Marxism, they proclaim that the government really is in charge of your children and not you, and they let you take care of them. ... This is completely antithetical to Judeo-Christian tradition,” Carson said. “Am I surprised to see the result in New York? I am not, because there has been a vicious attempt to indoctrinate our kids. ... Now we’re seeing the fruit of that indoctrination, and it’s something we’re going to have to deal with. The antidote to that, of course, is school choice, homeschool and getting involved in the political system so you get the right people on the school boards, and then the decision-making positions who understand who we are as a nation and don’t want to fundamentally change it.” Renewing the ‘moral base’ of America Like his mother before him, Ben Carson believes that education can overcome a lot of the problems we face. “Things like what happened in New York yesterday would not happen if people were truly knowledgeable, but they’re not knowledgeable. You see that all the time. You see the man-on-the-street interviews, and they ask people just the simplest questions, and they have no idea what the answer is. You could ask them who wrote Mozart’s 40th Symphony, and they wouldn’t know. That’s the level of ignorance that exists. We have to fight that,” he said. The Carsons are doing their part to help educate America with the American Cornerstone Institute, the nonprofit they founded to promote conservative principles and policy solutions. Through their Young Patriots program, the couple want to make sure that American children are taught to value faith, liberty, community and life. “We have a wonderful story to tell with this nation — the most prosperous nation that ever existed, and provided more opportunities for people than any other place ever has. It has a moral base, and as we allow all of that to recede, we’re suffering the consequences.”
