[M]ore than a dozen Kentuckians who have worked with the former secretary of the state Cabinet for Health and Family Services and chancellor of UK's [University of Kentucky, not United Kingdom] Chandler Medical Center say he is not bigoted and is deeply committed to providing health care for all.
"He never expressed anything but acceptance and fairness in the workplace," said Maria Kemplin, a lesbian who worked as a budget and policy analyst for Holsinger when he was chancellor.
As a cabinet secretary, Holsinger championed causes at odds with some conservative religious views, including stem cell research.
And as chancellor, he once faced down two conservative state senators who threatened to withhold funding from a lesbian health-care seminar at UK in 2002.
"He was unflinching in his support," said Phyllis Nash, who organized the conference and was then vice chancellor.
Testifying in 2005, he urged state lawmakers to amend or kill an anti-cloning bill, which he said could restrict future research. Holsinger emotionally recalled the death of his father, a retired Army brigadier general, from Parkinson's disease in 1994. Holsinger, 68, who is a professor of public health at UK, declined a request for an interview.
...
Holsinger's friends and colleagues said they've never heard him utter a homophobic remark.
Nash said that when a high-ranking UK official who was gay had a terminal disease diagnosed a few years ago, Holsinger was at his home the next day "counseling him and giving him support."
And state lawmakers from both parties and advocates for the disabled, mentally ill and elderly say that as Kentucky's top doctor, Holsinger fought for more accessible and flexible care and took on powerful forces to help raise the tax on cigarettes and to limit junk food in the schools.
"He has always appeared to me to be a very compassionate individual, which is what we want from somebody in charge of the public health," said state Rep. Kathy Stein, a liberal Democrat from Lexington who has championed gay rights.
And they say that his relationship with the ex-gay ministry of his church has been overblown:
Gay activists have questioned Holsinger's role in Hope Springs Community Church, which gay-rights blogs say seeks to "cure" gays of their homosexuality.
But church members and its pastor, the Rev. David Calhoun, said its mission has been misrepresented, as has Holsinger's role.
Calhoun said one of its recovery groups is for men with various sexual problems, including promiscuity. Gays are welcome to attend but not required to, and nobody is asked their sexual orientation, he said.
He also said Holsinger -- erroneously described as a pastor who founded the church -- has nothing to do with the sessions.
If this is all true, I should think it would make a difference. Most of the opposition to Holsinger has been because of things he has done in relation to the church: voting not to allow a lesbian to become a pastor; supporting another pastor who wouldn't let a gay man join the church; even his infamous 1991 paper, "Pathophysiology of Male Homosexuality" was written for the United Methodist Church's Committee to Study Homosexuality. And if the article is true, then he does seem capable of keeping his religious views out of his professional service... or so I think. The article is carefully written to point out that he's "championed causes at odds with some conservative religious views, including stem cell research". But it doesn't tell us whether he is personally opposed to these but supports them anyways, or whether he simply differs from the Bush administration's views on issues like these. In fact most of the article is spent trying to convince us what a nice guy he is--one section has the header "Doesn't curse, smoke or drink"--which is all well and good, but completely beside the point.
On the other hand, he made clear that his 1991 paper was a "medical opinion", not a religious one. The Bush administration is trying to defend Holsinger by claiming that his paper relied on the best information available in 1991:
Holly Babin, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said the paper "was a summary of scientific, peer-reviewed studies at the time."
"That was not his belief. It was not his opinion. It was a compilation of studies that were available at that time," she said.
"Over the last 20 years, a clearer understanding of these issues has been achieved," she said.
Unfortunately, that's not true. Jim Burroway, who has done excellent work looking at the "scientific" anti-gay papers released by the likes of Paul Cameron, Focus on the Family, and others, took a look at Holsinger's paper the other day. It's horrible, cherry-picking nonsense, and certainly not evidence of sound, objective scholarship.
[Holsinger's paper] shows a startling eagerness to pull evidence out of context to provide damning evidence against gay men, while willfully ignoring counter evidence in the same literature which essentially destroys the core of his arguments.
A lot of what Holsinger writes deals with anal penetration, citing other works to give the impression that anal sex is dangerous. However, the sources he cites are all dealing not with anal sex, as Holsinger would like us to believe, but with the intrusion of foreign objects. Further, a lot of it didn't even involve same-sex intercourse.
But wait, there's more:
After dealing briefly with sexually transmitted diseases, Holsinger introduced the squeamish subject of anorectal trauma, again implying that it is a common condition among gay men. He opened this line of argument by repeating this statement from Bush (1986):Consensual penile-anal intercourse can be performed safely. Few anorectal problems and no evidence of anal-sphincter dysfunction are found in heterosexual women who have anal-receptive intercourse. However, forceful anal penetration without lubrication against a resistant sphincter will result in abrasive trauma, causing fissures, contusions, thrombosed hemorrhoids, lacerations with bleeding, pain, and psychic trauma.
Notice what's going on here. If intercourse is consensual, then everything's okay. After all, they see few problems among straight women. But if it's not consensual then damage can occur. This statement seems to preclude the possibility that gay men can have consensual sex, doesn't it?
Holsinger seems to agree. The entire premise of his "scientific" evidence is not based on the ordinary bonds of affection that arise between committed gay and lesbian couples. Nor is it even based on the ordinary physical expressions of that love that occur in a mutually supportive and consensual basis. Instead, all three sources that Holsinger quoted from in this section (Bush, 1986; Geist, 1988; and Agnew, 1986) describe conditions that were found among men and women treated in emergency room settings. And much of the evidence provided in the Bush and Geist papers were the result of sexual assault, not consensual sex. It's no wonder Holsinger is able to find so many alarming medical problems. But what does his evidence have to do with gay and lesbian couples in love? Well, the answer is simple. It's no more relevant than the serial rapist is to the average loving heterosexual couple.
As Burroway concludes,
What he wrote was no error, nor is it a simple misreading of the medical literature. In fact, it is simply impossible to write what he wrote by accident or in error.
From the Surgeon General's website, the first sentence of the Mission of the Surgeon General says "The Surgeon General serves as America's chief health educator by providing Americans the best scientific information available on how to improve their health and reduce the risk of illness and injury." If this sort of education is what we can expect of Holsinger, I don't think he's up to the task.
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