Box Turtle Bulletin

Surgeon General Nominee Wrote Anti-Gay Tract

President Bush’s nomination of Dr. James Holsinger to be the next Surgeon General has raised red flags across the LGBT community. Dr. Holsinger, a Kentucky cardiologist and professor, was nominated on May 24, but his past writings and activities seem to indicate an egregious anti-gay bias, which would be a very troubling background for one who is to become the advocate-in-chief on all health matters.

Concerns were first raised when we learned that Dr. Holsinger and his wife were founders of Hope Springs Community Church in Lexington, Kentucky. According to the pastor, Hope Springs operates an ex-gay ministry. It’s unclear to me how involved Dr. Holsinger is in this ministry, if he’s involved at all. But he appears to be very active in the church overall, and so his views on the ex-gay movement are certainly worth examining.

But there is another fact that has surfaced which I find far more troubling. Holsinger is one of nine members of the United Methodist Church Judicial Council. As a member of the council he opposed a decision to allow a lesbian to be an associate pastor, and supported a pastor who would not permit an openly gay man to join the church.

But he did not arrive at that opinion on theological concerns alone, and this is where his nomination as Surgeon General takes on an especially sinister turn. The Human Rights Campaign has revealed that Holsinger wrote a white paper for the United Methodist Church titled, “Pathophysiology of Male Homosexuality.” In that paper, he gives his purportedly scientific opinion of the inherent inequality of gays, lesbians, bisexual and transgenders.

I find this especially troubling. There is an active genre of anti-gay literature which purports to offer scientific evidence that the gay “lifestyle” is inherently unhealthy. The problem with this genre is that it is easy to go to the medical literature to prove that any population poses a health threat to society. I did it when I wrote my parody of this literary genre, “The Heterosexual Agenda: Exposing the Myths. Several anti-gay extremists have discovered how easy it is to do this, even though the methods behind this genre are demonstrably worthless from a scientific standpoint.

We look to the Surgeon General to set aside personal biases to be an effective advocate for the health of all Americans. One of the best examples of this in recent history is Dr. C Everett Koop, an evangelical Christian who bravely battled strong anti-gay forces in the Reagan Administration in his attempts to give rational, scientifically sound information about the nascent AIDS crisis. While Dr. Koop may have had strong personal opinions on the morality of homosexuality, he took seriously his position as health advocate for all Americans.

At this point, I am not confident that Dr. Holsinger will be able to do this.

However, without seeing the paper myself, I cannot know exactly what he wrote. If someone can forward me a copy of the paper or tell me where I can find it, I’d be extremely grateful. I have access to a great medical library and would love the opportunity to give this paper a good vetting. If you have javascript enabled in your browser, you’ll find my e-mail address at the top of the sidebar at left.

UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who wrote in to provide links. You can find a PDF version of the article at the Lexington (KY) Herald-Leader web site under his photo. And the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Religion Editor Frank Lockwood posted an HTML browser-friendly version on his blog.

UPDATE: For more information on Holsinger’s paper, see A Closer Look at Dr. James Holsinger’s “Pathophysiology of Male Homosexuality”.