If all goes as planned, the nation’s top doctor will be an anti-gay bigot. ABC News is reporting this:
President Bush’s nominee for surgeon general, Dr. James W. Holsinger Jr., wrote a paper in 1991 that purported to make the medical argument that homosexuality is unnatural and unhealthy. Doctors who reviewed the paper derided it as prioritizing political ideology over science, and Democratic aides on Capitol Hill say the paper will make his confirmation hearings problematic.
Holsinger, 68, presented “The Pathophysiology of Male Homosexuality” in January 1991 to a United Methodist Church’s committee to study homosexuality. (Read the paper here.) The church was then considering changing its view that homosexuality violates Christian teaching, though it ultimately did not do so. Relying on footnotes from mainstream medical publications, Holsinger argued that homosexuality isn’t natural or healthy.
Yes, go read the paper. It purports to be a purely scientific argument for what he calls “the complementarity of the human sexes,” with respect to both intercourse and procreation, but what it really is is an attack on homosexual activity and hence on homosexuality itself. And remember, it was written in 1991, not 1891!
Holsinger does not allow that homosexuality could in any way be natural (human nature isn’t just physiological, after all — what about desire?), or even safe. All he does is point to “evidence” that anal sex is dangerous: “[T]he varied sexual practices of homosexual men have resulted in a diverse and expanded concept of sexually transmitted disease and associated trauma.” Apparently it did not occur to him that heterosexuals also engage in anal sex and other such “varied sexual practices”. He even addresses, of all things, fisting. Indeed, there is a strange sensationalist quality to the whole paper, as if it somehow brought him pleasure to write about “anal-sphincter dysfunction” in all its many forms, not to mention “forceful anal penetration without lubrication against a resistant sphincter”.
What is clear from all this is that Bush has nominated yet another theocratic ideologue for a key position — a health-related position — in government. Hard to believe, eh?