Tea Party hero Dr. Ben Carson, who has equated gay people with NAMBLA pedophiles, just announced he has formed a committee to explore a 2016 presidential run.

Ben Carson is a smart man. Having recently retired from on of the world’s most prestigious medical schools,Â he is literally a brain surgeon. Dr. Carson came to national attention through his many books, but it wasn’t until last year, when he stood on the same stage as President Barack Obama and attacked Obamacare that he became a beloved Tea Party hero.

Outspoken and highly-religious, Carson later went after LGBT people, equating them to pedophiles fromÂ NAMBLA (the North American Man/Boy Love Association) and people who have sex with animals.

â€œNo group, be they gays, be they NAMBLA, be they people who believe in bestiality, it doesnâ€™t matter what they are, they donâ€™t get to change the definition” of marriage, Carson said on Fox NewsÂ in March of 2013, just one month after his Obamacare bashing. “So itâ€™s not something thatâ€™s against gays, itâ€™s against anybody who wants to come along and change the fundamental definitions of pillars of society.”

Carson is also, perhaps ironically, anti-science.

â€œI donâ€™t believe in evolution,” Carson said in 2006. “I simply donâ€™t have enough faith to believe that something as complex as our ability to rationalize, think, and plan, and have a moral sense of whatâ€™s right and wrong, just appeared.â€

So it’s not surprising that Carson has sent the past 18 months touring conservative talk shows and laying the groundwork for a presidential run in 2016.

Today, Carson took one giant leap forward toward that goal.

Dr. Carson is “forming a political action committee and selecting the man who would run his campaign,” the right-wing news outlet, The Washington Times, reports.

Emerging from two-days of meetings with supporters in Palm Beach, Fla., Dr. Carson told the Times on Friday morning he has selected Houston businessman Terry Giles to be his 2016 campaign chairman should he run and approved the formation of a PAC called One Nation.

One Nation happens to be the name ofÂ Carson’s latest book.

â€œNow is the time to start all of the appropriate exploration and investigation, and put down the structure that is necessary,â€ Dr. Carson said in a phone interview. Asked about the likelihood he will run for president in 2016, Dr. Carson said: â€œI would say we are definitely a step or two closer than we were a year ago.â€

Carson’s anti-gay and anti-science positions are not the only ones that endear him to the far right.

Last summer he called abortion “human sacrifice,” last fall he labeled Obamacare “slavery,” and said that white liberals are â€œthe most racist people there are.”Â

An anti-science, anti-gay, anti-women, anti-choice, anti-liberal brain surgeon andÂ Tea Party hero.

2016 will be an interesting year.

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Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr