[The gay community] shouldn’t automatically assume that because you believe that marriage is between one man and one woman that you are a homophobe. Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen? He hasn’t issued a formal plan, summary statement or even talking points to explain it. “We will not entertain any further discussion on this issue”. The soft-spoken retired neurosurgeon didn’t engage with the other candidates directly. He said he was following Ronald Reagan’s 11th commandment, not to speak ill of a final Republican. However, once Carson read the script for the ad, Williams said the Republican candidate told him he “wasn’t comfortable” with the wording.
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Mannatech’s website includes stories of individuals around the globe that have earning more than $1 million since they began working with the company, including the formerly stressed single mom working three jobs in Australia, who is now able to afford holidays and travel.
“There is a company called Mannatech, a maker of nutritional supplements, with which you had a 10-year relationship”, Quintanilla asked. Mannatech didn’t admit to wrongdoing, but it agreed to a final judgment that the AG said would “halt deceptive trade practices” in Texas and paid $4 million to Texas customers. And yet, your involvement continued. Why? “Total propaganda.” He then backtracked a little.
BEN CARSON: Well, that’s easy to answer.
“I don’t actually believe that they have the right to force their way of life upon everybody else, nor would I want to force my way of life upon everybody else”, Carson told Kelly, before arguing that a hypothetical Muslim county clerk could not justifiably deny service to Christians. “That is total propaganda”, Carson said. It is absolutely absurd to say that I had any kind of relationship with them. I know people know how to investigate.
Just imagine if, after the Supreme Court ruled in 1967 in Loving v. Virginia, which ended state bans on interracial marriage, that a presidential frontrunner said, “It doesn’t make me a racist if I don’t support mixed marriages”. The suit filed by the Texas attorney general in 2007 also alleged the company sold a disc entitled “Back from the Brink” that “provided example after example of how “glyconutrients” (i.e., Mannatech’s products) cured, treated, or mitigated diseases including but not limited to toxic shock syndrome, heart failure, asthma, arthritis, Lou Gehrig’s Disease, Attention Deficit Disorder, and lung inflammation”, via the National Review.
At Wednesday’s debate, despite claiming to have “no involvement” with Mannatech, Ben Carson acknowledged that he “did a couple of speeches for them”, also acknowledging that Mannatech paid him for the speeches. They can easily find out that any videos I did with them were not paid for, were things I truly believed.
QUINTANILLA: To be fair, you were on the home page of their website with the logo over your shoulder.
In a 2004 video recently unearthed by the Wall Street Journal, Carson partially credited the disappearance of his prostate-cancer diagnosis to the kind of dietary supplements that Mannatech sells, which the Wall Street Journal pointed out are made of “substances such as larch-tree bark and aloe vera extract”.
Quintanilla then asked if Carson’s not knowing that he was on the homepage is indicative of poor judgement and vetting, which drew gasps and a few boos from the Boulder, Colorado crowd.
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CARSON: No, it speaks to the fact that I don’t know…
