June 14, 2007 | Sex & Society

(Surgeon) General concerns

Dr. James W. Holsinger Jr. is President Bush's nominee for Surgeon General, the chief medical officer of the U.S. Public Health Service. He'd be America's family doctor. But true to Bush style, anyone with a brain will have serious reservations about the choice.

In 1991, Holsinger wrote a paper attacking gay sex. In it he talks about "fist fornication" and "anal eroticism", while comparing sexual anatomy to "pipe fittings" in an attempt to prove homosexuality was unhealthy. He cited several sexual diseases and ailments that could be spread through anal activity, but ignored any parallels to vaginal sex.

A member of the United Methodist Church, he voted to expel a lesbian from the clergy in 2004. Last year he sided with a pastor who blocked a gay man from joining the congregation. Holsinger was also a founder of  Hope Springs Community Church which has an active "ex-gay" ministry that administers "reparative therapy" to unhappy homos. 

"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," said David Gergen, a former adviser to Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton. "There has been a growing criticism (of) the administration favoring ideology over competence, and this nomination smacks of that."

Joycelyn Elders, the pro-masturbation Surgeon General

Dr. Jocelyn Elders, President Clinton's first Surgeon General, agrees. "It would be very difficult for me to feel that this is the person that we should be confirming in this day and time... I think as the nation's chief health educator we need to know what he would do to help America evolve into a sexually healthy nation."

Elders faced her own controversy in 1994. At a United Nations conference on AIDS, she was asked whether it would be appropriate to promote masturbation as a means of preventing young people from engaging in riskier sexual activity. She replied, "I think that it is part of human sexuality, and perhaps it should be taught." Conservative Christian groups and right wing leaders demanded she be fired. President Clinton asked for her resignation.

Holsinger's views, however, fly in the face of science. "It's a totally faulty paper. The man doesn't know anything about human sexuality," said June M. Reinisch, Ph.D., director emeritus of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender & Reproduction. "There's clearly a political agenda in (his) paper. This is not a scientific paper."

Two happy homos

BananaGuide has conducted its own unofficial, but equally unbiased, research and found that men's pipes fit together just fine.

• Uproar over surgeon general nominee [LA Times]
• Surgeon General nominee is assailed for church role [The New York Times]
• Bush's Surgeon General nominee: "Ex-Gay" therapy on trial [Huffington Post]