More than a year after his nomination, and ten months after his
confirmation hearings, President Bush’s nomination of James
Holsinger as U.S. Surgeon General remains stalled because the
physician has publicly supported his church denomination’s
traditionalist stance on homosexuality.
The recent governing convention of the United Methodist Church,
in which Holsinger has served in prominent offices over the last 20
years, strongly reaffirmed its stances affirming marriage only as
the union of man and woman, describing homosexual practice as
“incompatible” with Christian teaching, and prohibiting ordination
to persons sexually active outside marriage.
The UMC’s position is hardly extraordinary. It resembles the
teaching of virtually every major Christian church. But Holsinger’s
public role in upholding that stance has been the chief obstacle to
his confirmation by the U.S. Senate’s Democratic majority. His
potential recess appointment has also been blocked by brief,
pro forma sessions convened in an empty chamber by U.S.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
“America’s top doctor should be a doctor for all Americans,”
Senator Barak Obama warned about Holsinger last year. “I have
serious reservations about nominating someone who would inject his
own anti-gay ideology into critical decisions about the health and
well-being of our nation.”
Teddy Kennedy, who chairs the Senate committee that would
confirm Holsinger, likewise shared his concern about whether
Holsinger could put “public health first and leave politics and
ideology behind.”
SPECIFICALLY, HOLSINGER has been attacked by gay groups, Senate
Democrats, and the New York Times for a 1991 paper he
wrote for a United Methodist study committee on homosexuality
called “Pathophysiology of Male Homosexuality.” The brief document
avoided Scriptural arguments and instead made health and natural
law arguments against moral approval for homosexual practice.
Senator Kennedy pressed Holsinger during his July 2007
confirmation hearings about the study paper, which Kennedy decried
as, “ideological and decidedly not an accurate analysis of the
science then available on homosexuality.”
Holsinger vaguely responded that the paper “does not represent
where I am today…without describing any specific disagreement
with it now. “And should I be confirmed as surgeon general of the
United States, I pledge to you today that I will continue that
commitment to serve all Americans, regardless of sexual orientation
or any other personal characteristic,” he continued. Evidently,
that assurance was not enough for Senate Democrats, including
Hillary Clinton, a fellow United Methodist who has criticized
Holsinger’s nomination.
Holsinger’s long medical career with the Department of Veterans
Affairs and more recently with the University of Kentucky’s medical
center has been distinguished. Few of his critics have questioned
his professional credentials, instead focusing nearly exclusively
on Holsinger’s church background.
Oddly, few prominent defenders of Holsinger have publicly
decried the bigotry that would seemingly exclude any publicly
orthodox Christian from serving as U.S. Surgeon General.
THANKS TO HIS publicly articulated defense of his church’s
teachings, Holsinger has been denounced by liberals in the public
square and within his own denomination. Having just completed eight
years on United Methodism’s top church court, he has presided over
several cases involving enforcement of the church’s prohibition
against actively homosexual clergy.
Liberal caucus groups within United Methodism targeted him and
other conservatives on the church court. One gadfly critic even
asked the church’s governing General Conference, which met April
23-May 2 in Fort Worth, to censure Holsinger.
The proposed censure motion went nowhere. Holsinger, now age 67,
did not run for election for the church’s court, which involves an
8 year term. Other conservatives on the court were defeated for
reelection. But the denominational convention by fairly strong
margins reaffirmed the church’s policies on homosexuality.
A proposed “compromise” that would have declared the church to
be of two minds on the issue was defeated by 55 to 45 percent among
the nearly 1,000 delegates. The church’s prohibitions against
active homosexual clergy and same-sex unions were upheld by larger
margins, including the church’s support for laws in civil society
that define marriage as the union of one man and one woman.
Remarkably, the affirmation for traditional Christian ethics by
the 7.9 million U.S. member denomination, America’s third largest
religious body, was unreported by nearly all national media. But
the United Methodist votes were largely a vindication for
Holsinger’s position, and significantly so, since his church is
still “mainline” and fairly liberal.
That vindication does not seem to have reignited Holsinger’s
prospects for a confirmation vote by the U.S. Senate. With only
months left to serve in an expiring Bush Administration, perhaps
most supporters do not see battling on Holsinger’s behalf worth the
political capital.
But a very qualified medical professional is being politically
disqualified from serving as U.S. Surgeon General primarily because
he affirms, within his own church, generic Christian ethical
teachings on homosexuality. Such a precedent seems potentially
dangerous to all traditional religious believers.
