Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson speaks to the crowd during a campaign rally held at Spring Arbor University in Spring Arbor, Mich. Sept. 23, 2015. (Jessica Christian/Jackson Citizen Patriot via AP)

Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson appeared on the O’Reilly Factor Thursday night and host Bill O’Reilly wasted no time in asking Carson about his controversial comments on Meet the Press that he “would not advocate” for a Muslim president.

Carson stated, as he has several times since the Sunday interview in which he made the remarks, that his comments were taken out of context:

If anybody listened to that interview, I said quite clearly, that anyone — it doesn’t matter who they are or what their religion is — if they subscribe to American values and are willing to place our Constitution above their religious beliefs I have no problem with them.

“I wouldn’t advocate we put a Christian in there either if their agenda was a theocracy,” Carson went on to say. “If they were not willing to subject their religious belief to the Constitution I would not advocate for them.”

O’Reilly went on to ask Carson if he thought the tenets of Islam “as described in the Quran” line up with the “tenets of Judeo-Christian philosophy that the Founding Fathers used to forge the Constitution, our laws and our nation?”

“I don’t believe that they do,” Carson said, adding, “When I look at Islamic nations, what I see are people who don’t give women equal rights. In some places women aren’t even allowed to drive.”

O’Reilly pointed out that those laws are more of a manifestation of politics than religion. He used Morocco as an example of a Muslim country that didn’t impose such restrictions on women.

Carson responded by saying he didn’t have any problem with people who have “a Muslim background.”

“I know lot of people with Muslim backgrounds who are fully assimilated into America and accept American values and accept our Constitution,” Carson said. “I don’t have any problem with that.”

Carson said when he made the comment on Meet the Press, he was talking about “someone who doesn’t share those values.”

“This is America, if you want to live in another system go somewhere else,” Carson said. “They’re welcome to be here, but no one else gets to change who we are.”