Following up on an item from last week, Dr. James W. Holsinger Jr., Bush’s nominee for Surgeon General, has a record of activism that suggests a strong anti-gay bias. Opposition to his nomination has been growing, but it’s been unclear whether there was enough information available to sink his chances.
Maybe this will do the trick. Holsinger wrote a paper in 1991 arguing that, from a medical perspective, homosexuality is unnatural and unhealthy, a position rejected by professionals as prioritizing political ideology over science.
Holsinger, 68, presented “The Pathophysiology of Male Homosexuality” in January 1991 to a United Methodist Church’s committee to study homosexuality. (Read the .pdf 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.
“A confirmation fight is exactly what the administration does not need,” said David Gergen, a former adviser to Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton, who predicted the paper would cause a “minor storm” among Democrats on Capitol Hill.
“You have to wonder given the quality of some of the nominations that have gone forward recently, whether the selection group in the White House has gone on vacation,” Gergen said. “There has been a growing criticism the administration favoring ideology over competence, and this nomination smacks of that.”
Good for Gergen. For him, that’s pretty strong criticism.
Keep in mind, it’s not just the ’91 paper that’s raising questions about Holsinger’s anti-gay animus. He also helped found a religious ministry that seeks to “cure” gays of their “lifestyle.”
But the details of his piece are probably going to raise the most questions.
Holsinger’s paper argued that male and female genitalia are complementary — so much so “that it has entered our vocabulary in the form of naming pipe fittings either the male fitting or the female fitting depending upon which one interlocks within the other.” Body parts used for gay sex are not complementary, he wrote. “When the complementarity [sic] of the sexes is breached, injuries and diseases may occur.”
Holsinger wrote that “[a]natomically the vagina is designed to receive the penis” while the anus and rectum — which “contain no natural lubricating function” — are not. “The rectum is incapable of mechanical protection against abrasion and severe damage … can result if objects that are large, sharp or pointed are inserted into the rectum,” Holsinger wrote.
I’m not an expert, but I suspect gay men’s penises are not “sharp or pointed.” It seems like the kind of thing a medical professional would know — and wouldn’t put in print.
One assumes that the White House, which has several staffers devoted to vetting potential nominees for confirmation, knew about Holsinger’s “unorthodox” (read: bigoted) ideas, and thought they were irrelevant to him becoming the nation’s leading public health educator. That’s astounding, though given the last six years, hardly surprising.
Maybe Holsinger is prepared to repudiate his previous work. Perhaps, during his confirmation hearings, Holsinger will be reasonable, well-informed, and entirely rational about controversial issues, denouncing the crazy things he’s believed in years past.
But somehow, I doubt it. The White House appears to have picked him because of his religious agenda, not in spite of it.
Expect interesting hearings.