—Mainly for believing in the tenets of his religion—a trend that, should it continue, would make the unwritten requirement for being elected to public office a perverse need to appear religious, even as the candidate doesn’t really believe in any of that hocus pocus.
Which, come to think of it, perfectly describes a host of Democratic presidential hopefuls.
But I digress. From ABC/AP:
President Bush’s nominee for surgeon general, Kentucky cardiologist Dr. James Holsinger, has come under fire from gay rights groups for voting to expel a lesbian pastor from the United Methodist Church and writing in 1991 that gay sex is unnatural and unhealthy.
Also, Holsinger helped found a Methodist congregation that, according to gay rights activists, believes homosexuality is a matter of choice and can be “cured.”
“He has a pretty clear bias against gays and lesbians,” said Christina Gilgor, director of the Kentucky Fairness Alliance, a gay rights group. “This ideology flies in the face of current scientific medical studies. That makes me uneasy that he rejects science and promotes ideology.”
Holsinger, 68, has declined all interview requests.Blair Jones, a White House spokesman, said in a telephone interview Wednesday night that Holsinger had spent his career in public service and taking care of others.
“On numerous occasions, Dr. Holsinger has taken up the banner for underrepresented populations, and he will continue to be a strong advocate for these groups and all Americans,” Jones said.
Platitudes aside, here’s the only question of any relevance: can Holsinger separate his religious beliefs from his medical practice and his professional comportment.
And the answer, according to those who’ve worked with him (rather than simply “vetted” his religious beliefs for signs of latent homophobia) is that yes, he can—and, more importantly, that yes, he has:
Holsinger served as Kentucky’s health secretary and chancellor of the University of Kentucky’s medical center. He taught at several medical schools and spent more than three decades in the Army Reserve, retiring in 1993 as a major general.
His supporters, including fellow doctors, faculty members and state officials, said he would never let his theological views affect his medical ones.
“Jim is able, as most of us are in medicine, to separate feelings that we have from our responsibility in taking care of patients,” said Douglas Scutchfield, a professor of public health at the University of Kentucky.
[my emphasis]
This idea that religious people cannot separate out their religious beliefs from their professional duties, in addition to flying in the face of our country’s very history, is troubling for other reasons—specifically in that i it merely mimics the prejudices that gay rights activists claim to be combating to begin with.
Because let’s be candid here: were Holsinger an openly gay candidate for Surgeon General, gay activists would positively bristle at the suggestion that he might be unable to perform his job because he believes that gay sex is as natural to humans as breathing.
And they’d be right to do so—if in fact their candidate had both a distinguished record as a physician, and the backing of his professional peers based upon his past performances as both public servant and scholar.
Wash him up with Lourdes water and sew him up, wouldja?
You make an excellent point, but maybe Bush should consider his own self-interest and think about nominating someone from here:
http://www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=IJP.072.0365A
maybe.
(The hyperlink thingy is busted, it seems.)
As a matter of established fact, is it not true that gay males place themselves at greater risk because of the mechanics of gay sex? Just as a doctor shouldn’t let his theology influence his medical opinion, so shouldn’t lavender identity politics.
Well, how about floating Bill Frist if this nominee gets shot down?
This is really a topic for the 2001 Andrew Sullivan rather than the 2007 Andrew Sullivan, and it’s certainly no topic for me, but yes, it IS inherently dangerous and unhealthy.
And a cute ass.
It seems natural that lefties would believe this to be impossible since so many of them lack this ability themselves.
Query: what don’t gay advocates complain about? I mean, seriously, they’re paid to complain.
Tw: It’s not like it’s not expected52 of them
Does separating out your religious beliefs from your medical opinion mean suppressing those medical opinions that happen to coincide with your religious beliefs?
To avoid accusations of bigotry, that is.
Just so…better put than mine.
So much for that, eh?
Christina Gilgour of the Kentucky Fairness Alliance is, apparently, not up on what flies in the face of science. Even the head of the Human Genome Project has stated that homeosexuality is not hardwired.
But then again, who can really expect fairness from a leftist?
When gays in America start fighting against the treatment of homosexuals under Islam then perhaps I may give a shit about gay whatever. Until then I don’t believe a word they say.
Geez, ever since gay activists hijacked homosexuality it has been about as sane a world as when feminist activists hijacked womanhood.
Both gayists and feminist can blow me.
Even the head of the Human Genome Project has stated that homosexuality is not hardwired.
Yes, but Francis Collins is one of those nasty Godbotherers, so everything he says is suspect, I tell you.
I bought The Language of God and hoped that he was making a case FOR God based on the human genome. Instead, it was directed at those believers in God who have a hard time accepting evolution. Because I’m not in his target audience, I stopped reading after a few chapters.
Oh well.
Ouch! Love those Constitutional smack-downs, I do.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Unless one of them happens to be 15.
Heavens to Betsy!! Activists playing loose and fast with scientific facts?
I’m shocked, I tell you! SHOCKED!
(global warming)
This is an outrage…etc. blah blah blah …
But is there a consensus on that?
No, no, no. It’s science the WAY IT SHOULD BE that the gay rights activists are concerned with, not science the way it is.
And unlike Darwin, I doubt ichneumon wasps are going to change their minds any time soon. Or that animal homosexuality tends to be a dominance issue (like the Romans, lolwhat), as the case may be.
I agree. This guy’s scholarship is top-notch.
Be sure to tell your wives/girlfriends, fellas: knives in the va-jay-jay are a-o-kay-kay.
So, Moops, the medical school you attended taught that the end of the GI tract is well designed for intercourse? Interesting.
D.O. or M.D.?
Moops, maybe you should ask him whether it’s safe for you to keep strawmen up your ass just so can come here and crap them out in front of honest folk.
This is quite true. Lesbian sex, OTOH, has no apparent downside, unless there’s a bull dyke involved.
Or so I’ve heard.
Fear not, Moops. Your hobby is safe. Sort of.
Christ, fellas. So defensive. Rest assured, I can think of no better candidate for Surgeon General than the world’s leading expert on buttsecks.
Pablo,
I’m not interested in hearing about your weekend. Thanks.
It’s projection pure and simple. The left does not believe religious folks can seperate their religious beliefs from politics because they themselves can not make that seperation. In fact, for the left, their politics is their religion. They have unswerving faith in a host of religions ( they call them causes, global warming, affirmative action, single payer health insurance, income redistribution, etcetera), that have a tyrannts hold on their entire political view that they are rendered incapable of imagining another’s ability to seperate religion from politics.
Moops, I haven’t mentioned my weekend. I’m just allaying your obvious fears. Feel free to indulge, but leave the knives in the kitchen, k?
Everything will be just fine. Or just as fucked up as when you started, which is close enough.
What medical school would say it’s “designed” for anything?
Well “evolved” then. Or well “suited”. Whatever term conveys that it/system/organ/etc., functions for the purpose being discussed…would you consider a nostril a well formed/evold/designed/made/grown place for ingesting food? Probably not.
Where does he say that?
Or are you making shit up to slander him because someone said he’s a bad man?
Moops,
Spend some time in your local ER. A day or two should suffice. Although, from the sounds of it, the over the top weird stuff happens on the coasts. Amusing stories for sure.
Commonly heard in an ER in the USA…..”How did he get that in there”?
Common response….”I fell on it”.
All very “natural” stuff of course.
He says that vaginas are fit for insertion generally, but rectums are not, and goes on to use sharp objects as an example of something that rectums aren’t really compatible with. The implication is that vaginas are cool with it.
At any rate, calm down, big guy. It’s just a joke about this ridiculous paper.
I appreciate the reassurance from a seasoned veteran, but it isn’t really my scene. You’ll have to look elsewhere for a protege.
I don’t have any experience or specialized knowledge about any of this, Moops. I’m just listening to the science, and telling you what you need to do. Like Al Gore!
tw: growth67
No, what he said was:
Nothing general about it.
No, what he said was:
Incapable of mechanical protection against large, sharp OR pointed does not mean knives, and it doesn’t imply anything like this:
Are you seriously trying to imply that fucking an ass is no different than fucking a pussy? You must be freekin amazing at foreplay, is all I got to say.
I’m really touched at the great concern shown here for the treatment this kook is getting from the “left”. Those crazy “leftists” at it again, protesting the nomination of a religious nut with a fringe agenda from being Surgeon General. Touched.
Now, why would anyone suspect that this guy can’t keep his religious views and government decisions separate? No GWB appointee has sullied his policy with overtly religious views! It isn’t like they’d sell books in the Grand Canyon national park bookstore that say the canyon was formed by The Great Flood! Oh, wait.
It isn’t like they’d require 1/3 of African HIV prevention funds to be spent on worthless abstinence only programs! Oh wait.
I’m sure at a minimum he keeps his girlfriend/wife amused. Or at least always guessing.
From time to time I get the feeking that our esteemed host is sitting at his keyboard, creating these charicatures like Moops. Otherwise, Moops is too perfect of an example of the hysterical nature of the extreme left wing. Hysteria and appeals to emotion are all they have got.
Take sheet, for example. Absolutely no qualms about flat out lying. One of the most effective, and only 100 percent certain methods of prevention is abstinence. The abstinence programs by the governments in some African countries have proven to be effective. Presumably, we should just force American pharmaceutical companies to give away more drugs, which ironically, cannot prevent the disease, nor cure the disease.
Yeah, because keeping your dick in your pants never prevented HIV! Oh wait.
Maybe because
…but don’t let such minor matters as facts slow you down in your rush to attack that which you do not, nay cannot understand.
It’s what makes you the you that Jesus loves.
I wish I was at my computer so I could find stats and figures, but I am positive that the country in Africa that has most successfully worked to reduce the numbers of infected did so with an aggressive abstinence campaign.
b moe-
Are you seriously trying to imply that fucking an ass is no different than fucking a pussy? You must be freekin amazing at foreplay, is all I got to say.
Moops is a “leftist asshatt”- His idea of “foreplay” is saying “Marx” before he fucks the 300 lb sow who passed out in the corner three hours ago…
From each according to his ability…
So we have some votes for abstinence stopping HIV in Africa. Any votes for Noah’s flood forming the Grand Canyon?
Do you believe in virgin birth, heet?
That’s right, simple reasoning for simple minds. I like it. Problem is, I thought you classic liberals were all about personal freedom. You know, like the freedom to fuck different people.
You know what? It’s almost as if your only position is the one that manages to oppose the position that opposes GWB. Luckily, there’s enough rhetorical power in PW to make any position consistent with whatever moral system you choose.
Actually, I am drunk as hell from a co-workers company wedding shower and it has made me realize there is just too damn much negative energy about a beautiful thing in these last two comment threads, so I have taken it upon myself to cheer everybody up:
Enjoy.
I love that song. Thanks…
You forgot the part about the responsiblity that goes along with it, but otherwise that about sums it up. As for the rest of this:
What the fuck are you talking about? I am simply questioning your implication that abstinence won’t prevent HIV. You accusing us of being contrarian to contrarian politics is pretty damn funny, though, even if I do disagree with Bush much more often than not.
Whatever, enjoy the link and lighten the fuck up, you might actually be able to make a coherent point.
heet
You aren’t real are you? Just a left cult member script that generates left-cult falsehoods and memes.
Even articles “you” use … “is” “the” “and” … are suspect when “you” use ‘em.
I know it is fucking pointless to attempt to discuss things with heet, but … I have no problem with abstinence education, in general. If they are going to teach about sex, and that is a given, then abstinence should be one of the options taught. In parts of Africa, HIV is at or near epidemic proportions. As a result, it would be beyond insanity to not educate the populace that abstinence is the only 100 percent way of not contracting the disease. Essentially, we can teach them how to avoid ever getting a fatal disease, or we can take heet’s Russian Roulette approach. So, heet, would you prefer to save a greater number with methods that were contrary to your politics, or just the lucky ones, while maintaining your politics?
BWHAHAHAHAHAH! Deja vu the hippie 60’s …
“Yes, baby, I believe in peace and equality. Down with The Man! We are free of all those middleclass, square constraints. Now, let’s fuck!”
That, ladies and gentlemen, is the essense of the Left cult… adolescent gonads emoting.
Sorry, Darleen, looks like BMoe wins the prick prize for sperm production. Someone so intent on the mechanichs of gay sex should either be awarded an honorary PhD, or a night at George Michael’s place.
Mock all you want, Darleen, it sure was fun being young then. But the 60’s had nothing on the 70’s. The 60’s were about all that muddle-headed, flower-child crap about “free love” and “experimenting.” In the 70’s, we got serious about it. Robert Klein said the 70’s were a decade when if two people found themselves alone together (great album, btw), they felt obligated to have sex. The only thing I’d quibble with there is the number. If you know what I mean. I used to miss the 70’s until the internet came along. Now we have AFF. Wheeeee……
Jaysas, cynn … who salt petered your ice cream?
CraigC
Being young is all about pushing the envelope and taking risks.
And in many ways the 60’s and even some of the 70’s seem so earnestly innocence in their simple lechery (I graduated high school in 1972, so my adolescence kinda of straddled the decades) compared to the almost grim way some youth pursue their indulgence in slap-n-tickle.
Yet, heet demonstrates there is nothing so vicious as arrested adolescence as political policy.
…. you said “petered”—hee hee,
heet makes my earlier point for me. Teehee!
When all you’ve got is a hammer, it behooves you to reframe every problem as a nail, I s’pose.
And, any program that labels AIDS as epidemic but refuses to follow any form of quarantine protocol for handling epidemics loses my support. It’s fine to treat people who are infected; in fact, it’s humanitarian–but for heaven’s sake, people. Needle exchanges and sexual counseling for seropositives and their seronegative partners is not the way to go.
As unkind as it seems, HIV-AIDS as an infectious disease would disappear after a generation if it were treated like one. Aggressive quarantining, restriction of any kind of activity that would risk infecting others, and all. That, however, appears to be a bridge too far.
But having gotten off-topic liek whoa, I’ll shut up now.
Well, there are others who are experts, advocates, participants, exhorters, missionaries, lobbyists, and butt buddies, and they warn their own about the serious health problems the gay lifestyle bestows in so many ways for its practitioners.
As for AIDS prevention, Uganda has the greatest success in reducing HIV prevalence in the world, and it was done with a program that teaches abstinence until marriage, monogamy, and all those old and tired precepts of traditional morality.
Maybe libs don’t want such things taught to brown peoples…it makes them live longer and reproduce more effectively. After all, that is the heritage of Planned Parenthood founder, Margaret Sanger, to kill as many “inferior people” as possible.
(I’m sorry, that last one is rather shrill, but what the hell, it is about Sanger, and much of it is true.)
You know, I really had no idea there were this many people confused by the difference between rectums and vaginas. Perhaps I should begin holding seminars, or maybe a performance art piece:
The Rectum Monologues!
Oh, geez…I gotta be careful having my morning coffee while reading this site…
almost lost the laptop
LOL!
Rated “R” for dirty language.
Please, please, please, please tell me it won’t involve a mirror on the floor and a potty chair?
Already done in Pink Flamingos. Thanks to that, I’ll never be able to listen to the song “Surfer Bird” without involuntarily shuddering.
“I love eggs!”
They sell it alongside the books about the native-American creation myths, New-Age crap, etc. It’s not along side the geology books.
Which, frankly, puts it into a different light. Not that you have the intellectual honesty to realize that.
lulz.
Are you suggesting that the “Kentucky Fairness Alliance” has a “mainstream” agenda?
Do you think a Methodist is more or less “mainstream” than the director of a “gay rights group”?
Rob:
Nice smackdown on the Grand Canyon thing.
Heet reminds me of a little boy, during a battle with his neighbors, reaching into a barrel of assorted rotten fruit and flinging handfulls in the hope that something will find the mark and cause some kind of a wound. What, exactly, does he bring to the table, other than vitriol, unsupported accusations and totally false conclusions as to commentators assertations?
He’s condescendingly partisan, intellectually bankrupt, utterly clueless and, well, a hater!
Best he is ignored, beyond setting the record straight on his inevitable factual inanities.
BEGONE, FOUL BEAST!
What I find amazing about the whole Grand Canyon thing is that even after the original claim (“park rangers aren’t allowed to discuss the age of the canyon!”) was debunked, the beef lives on as the slightly-less-dishonest “they’re selling a book with a creationist slant at the Grand Canyon bookshop!”
Well, yeah. So what? I’d never buy it, but I’m not its audience. I’d also never buy a socialist economic text, or a Democrat politician’s policy statements. That they’re being sold is no skin off my fore.
And, fascinatingly, the people bitching about that book being for sale in that bookshop ignore the patently false crud the various park services peddle about American pre-history. I’ve only seen ONE museum exhibit that gets the arrival of mankind to the Americas even close to correct; most of them still peddle the “Clovis-first, walked over the land bridge from Asia” line. Some even make claims like the pre-Columbians living in peace, or having equitable societies, or not practicing slavery.
Mind bogglingly, I’ve seen them selling books pushing that kind of crap within sight of the location where dozens of human sacrifices were unearthed.
Museum book stores will have books extolling the feminism of pre-Columbian cultures, their environmentalism, their existence in a pure Rousseauian paradise—and never get a mention from the asshats who go apeshit over a single Creationist tract.
Hardly. The point was about pushing a nonsensical religious position on park property. Rob C even rants about it above. So, how was that a smackdown, again?
You remind me of the turd I launched about an hour ago. I bet you leave a ring on the walls of a room as you exit, too.
Maybe if you read it a second time, you will understand the distinction. Or do you seriously believe that Bush takes the native-American creation myth literally, also? Are you offended that the non-sensical religious positions of native-Americans are being pushed on park property?
Damn, dude. Might want to check the fit on that toilet seat, I thought they were one size fits all but it sounds like you might need a custom fit, there.
The feces flinging, and referencing, monkey is back. Obviously, reading comprehension is not being taught in the local grade schools these days.
I would posit that it is not neccessary for a Christian to seperate their theology from their work to be a good public servant.
I don’t think a Christian doctor would refuse to treat a patient because of their moral condition. Grace, forgiveness, belief in preserving life in service to the hope of redemption is the cornerstone of Christian faith.
Non-GodBotherers don’t understand that the Samaritan did what was good for his cultural nemisis not because his faith was set aside for the moment. The Good Samaritan did what he did because loving your enemies is a key component of the Faith.
Tim:
Well said!
heet will be calling for a ban on those “nonsensical” Native American myths and New Age blather essays any day now.
Barring that, he will continue to show himself as an ignorant, religious bigot whose sole mission is to trumpet his brand of hate from sea to stinky sea.
JD:
Reading comprehension does not advance the narrative for heet so it’s entirely optional, meaning completely unnecessary. Why argue actual postions when it’s so much easier to make them up, spray them around and call people names for good measure?
heet is the ultimate intellectual couch potato.
BJ Texas wrote:
Heet confirms it with:
Comedy. Gold.
Yes, indeed, Patrick.
I’m convinced that while Jeff professes a commitment to open debate, he really keeps people like heet arounbd because of these exquisite little unintentioned comedic pearls.
Once they stop being unintentionaly funny, out they go!
So many easy targets, so little time…
How about this one – I find it so very, VERY odd that the only time there is a “problem” with anal sex, is when the anus belongs to a man. Hetero sodomy is all okee dokee, though.
Come on, people. I don’t care what the guy’s religion is, but when considering the qualifications for the government’s top medical position, discussing the “cure” for the gays goes in the “con” column.
Call me kooky.
Actually, I’ll just call you “late for dinner.”
Next!
Well, let’s just say I have better things to do between Friday and Monday than to be sitting in front of a PC reading blogs. So now I’m catching up.
It was 75 and sunny Friday and Sunday here. There is but one thing to do.