The Daily Kos http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/6/1/11540/63349) is reporting that last week with little fanfare, Chimperator George W. Bush announced his intention to nominate James W. Holsinger, Jr., to serve as the 18th Surgeon General of the United States. While Holsinger previously ran the State of Kentucky's health care system and the University of Kentucky's medical center, there's more to the story: Holsinger is a Christianist who believes homosexuality can be "cured."
Bush said that as America's chief health educator, Holsinger "will be charged with providing the best scientific information available on how Americans can make smart choices that improve their health." Too bad he apparently doesn't trust the conclusions of the APA, AMA and a host of other medical and mental health experts when it comes to reparative therapy. Things do not bode well for America's health care with this guy in charge.
The Lexington Herald-Leader (http://www.kentucky.com/454/story/85442.html)has published this story on this nomination:
The nomination of University of Kentucky professor Dr. James W. Holsinger as U.S. surgeon general has come under fire from groups that fear his actions as a high-ranking official in the United Methodist Church indicate he is anti-gay.
Holsinger, 68, who holds UK's Charles T. Wethington Jr. Chair in the Health Sciences and is a former chancellor of UK's Chandler Medical Center and a former state Secretary of the Cabinet for Health and Family Services, is being challenged for his role in decisions by the United Methodist Judicial Council. That highest "court" rules on disputes involving church doctrine and policies in the nation's second-largest Protestant denomination.
In his role on the nine-member Judicial Council, Holsinger has opposed a decision to allow a practicing lesbian to be an associate pastor, and he supported a pastor who would not permit an openly gay man to join the church. In both instances, Holsinger's supporters say, he was correctly interpreting and applying church policy. (The church's bishops voted later to allow the gay man to become a member.)
Worse yet:
Holsinger and his wife, Barbara, were members of Lexington's First United Methodist Church, which asked them to set out and start a new congregation.
They founded Hope Springs Community Church in a warehouse at 1109 Versailles Road. Calhoun called it a socially diverse congregation with a "very vital recovery ministry." It serves the homeless and those with addictions to drugs, alcohol and sex; and it has a Spanish-language Hispanic congregation with its own pastor.
"It's built around compassion for people who struggle with a lot of issues," he said. Hope Springs also ministers to people who no longer wish to be gay or lesbian, Calhoun said. "We see that as an issue not of orientation but of lifestyle," he said. "We have people who seek to walk out of that lifestyle."
Why didn't Bush simply nominate a witch doctor? If there was any remaining doubt that Bush is an idiot tool of the Christianists, this nomination ought to remove it completely. How much longer will it be safe for gays to live in the USA?
4 comments:
Come on up, we'd love to welcome you to the great white north with open arms.
O Canada, our home and native land :-)
It amazes me the kind of crap going on with the bunch of mental-defectives running the show.
Seriously, maybe it's time you moved north. And you don't need to say "eh".
Where does Bush find these loons?
Appointing a Roman Catholic physician as Population Control Czar who claims contraceptives are ineffectual in either family planning or population control? Seriously?
Now, another scientific and medically trained physician and Evangelical who trumps facts with fiction? As Surgeon General? Is he an AIDS denialist, too? Will they have a "private anointing" on his being sworn in?
I seem to remember public fears about John F. Kennedy taking his orders from Rome rather than from the Constitution and the electorate. It seemed silly at the time, and it was, but it's the reason he (almost) lost that election.
But, in our matters of public health, as in our Chief Executive -- nearly 45 years after JFK -- we have no fears about Evangelicals doing the very same thing that they public feared Kennedy doing?
Not at all. Now it is the cause celebre. Pat Robertson and Jessie Jackson actually seek the presidency, the Evangelicals install one of their own over the will of the electorate, and he divines these wasky nominees, policies, and runs-down our government -- with Evangelicals praising Jesus's Name for Bush as the "best president ever" (James Dobson)?
This behavior is not only subversive, treasonous, but extremely dangerous. We've already barely escaped (or endured) FIVE constitutional crises in the past 6.4 years, initiated an Unholy, Unjust, and Unsound War on Presidential Fabrications, and abandoned Katrina victim in the baptism of death, and the opponents to these incredulous in/actions don't have the courage to "just say no?"
Why didn't Bush simply nominate a witch doctor? Good question. He certainly is the Wizard of Wickedness, Destruction, and Deceit, but praise Jesus? A great many people have their dots disconnected, their signals crossed, and their identities misconstrued. This "faith" community is not divine, but satanic. Remember Jesus's warnings: Beware of wolves in sheep's clothing. Oh, I forgot, that's a figure of speech, and these folk only understand the literal.
I get both. And being screwed and being fucked over have more than one meaning, but maybe not if one is fucked up with god delusions. Where are the Exorcists when we need them to purge the land of Promotor Fidei? The demons are not only getting out of control, they are in control
just want to say one thing, why does everyone always want to "cure" us, ignore us, shove us in the corner, are that much of a threat to world peace and national security, as being newly out, i am finding this very disconcerting.....they should be all shipped to an island somewhere where they can all live there picture perfect homophobic lives in peace....
question: (and I'm gay too, so don't worry)...
is there more info on him "running a program to cure gays"?
I can't find anything about that specifically.
I'd like to write Miss Clinton about it. So some ammo would be nice :)
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