Americans For Truth Ends Support for Dr. Holsinger: “Nation’s Top Doctor Must Tell the Truth about Homosexual Health Risks”

 Russell Groff, 1978-2004

Russell died at age 26 of HIV/AIDS after living in a homosexual relationship. How many future men will die young if the politically correct silence on homosexual health risks is not broken? Groff’s mother wants to use his life to warn other parents and children about the perils of embracing a “gay” lifestyle.

By Peter LaBarbera

We live in a cowardly and confused age, so perhaps it was too much to expect that Dr. James Holsinger, President Bush’s nominee for U.S. Surgeon General, would defend his own writings outlining the immense health risks of (male) homosexual behavior.

Unfortunately, on Thursday at his Senate confirmation hearing, Dr. Holsinger succumbed to the Bush Administration’s spin-doctors, Sen. Ted Kennedy’s bluster — and, evidently, his own lack of conviction — and said not one word in defense of his 1991 paper, “Pathophysiology of Male Homosexuality,” which was written to shore up the faithful against forces in the Methodist Church seeking to undermine the church’s historic Biblical teachings on sexual sin.

Here is an account of the telling exchange between Sen. Kennedy and Dr. Holsinger, from the homosexual Washington Blade newspaper (emphasis added):

Holsinger’s critics have questioned the credibility of the studies he cites in his paper, saying most experts in public health agree that gays and straights are equally susceptible to sexually transmitted diseases, including AIDS. Critics have said the determining factors for transmission of sexually transmitted diseases are unprotected sex and the frequency of unprotected sexual encounters, regardless of whether such encounters are between same-sex or opposite-sex couples.

Kennedy said he received a letter from nine doctors with knowledge in human sexuality who denounced Holsinger’s paper as “wholly unscientific, biased and incredibly poor scholarship.”

“Dr. Holsinger’s paper cherry picks and misuses data to support his thesis that homosexuality is unhealthy and unnatural,” Kennedy said at the hearing…

…Holsinger said his paper was an unpublished review of the medical literature on health-related issues pertaining to male homosexuality nearly 20 years ago.

“I did not attempt to write a definitive scientific paper,” he said.

He said he now believes the paper is outdated.

“First of all, the paper does not represent where I am today,” he said. “It does not represent who I am today.”

So what are Dr. Holsinger’s views on whether homosexual acts are unnatural and unhealthy? We don’t know.

It seems that between 1991 and 2007, Dr. Holsinger went from defending truth to evading it, with some help in recent weeks from Bush Administration bureaucrats. (From the moment his nomination became national news, Holsinger’s White House handlers were pushing the idea that he’d moved on from his 1991 views: in the words of Health & Human Services spokeswoman Holly Babin, “Over the last 20 years, a clearer understanding of these issues has been achieved.”)

Meanwhile, homosexual activists threw everything but the kitchen sink at the doctor’s 1991 paper, but the nub of their opposition came down not to medical points — after all, the “gay” movement has made HIV/AIDS the most politically protected disease in American history — but to variations on this argument from homosexual activist Jim Burroway, critiquing the 1991 paper:

…Holsinger made the fatal error of ignoring the bonds of affection and devotion that arise in gay and lesbian couples. He reduced the rich complexity of their relationships to pipe fittings and how they interlock with each other.

In other words, Dr. Holsinger’s “fatal error” 16 years ago was that he agreed with God, not “gays,” about homosexual behavior. (Memo to God: consult with Jim Burroway ASAP re: your condemnation of same-sex practice; study up on the “rich complexity” of modern homosexuality and re-write your moral law and the Bible accordingly.)

Homosexual activists love bashing the “religious right,” but they are hyper-fundamentalists when it comes to defending their core ideological myth: that homosexuality and “same-sex relationships” are a “normal variation of human sexuality” — i.e., that they are NOT morally wrong (changeable sin) in the historic Judeo-Christian tradition.

So desperate are pro-“gay” advocates to force their Bible-rejecting myth on the culture that they downplay even serious health risks that result from embracing behaviors that a loving God proscribes. The result is that children in schools across the country are NOT being taught that there are special dangers, including HIV/AIDS, associated with homosexual behaviors. (See Dr. John Diggs’ paper, “The Health Risks of Gay Sex,” for more information.)

We thought, based on his past work, that Dr. Holsinger, too, rejected the “gay” myth, but apparently, to use Washington parlance, he has “grown.” At the very least, he was pushed into a politically correct posture by a Bush Administration that fears public battles on the homosexual issue. Sure, it’s appropriate to focus on the Kentucky doctor’s excellent work against childhood obesity, but why go silent on the perils of homosexual behaviors when the CDC reports that “men who have sex with men” (MSM) — maybe that should be “men who commit sodomies with men” — comprise a full 71 percent of male HIV/AIDS cases?

In the face of such figures, how can a thinking person assert that “gays” (in this case, men practicing homosexuality) and straights are “equally susceptible to STDs including AIDS,” as the Blade asserts? (Click HERE for news about another STD, neurosyphilis, that is disproportionately affecting homosexual men in major cities.)

Statistics are easier to dismiss than the human victims of homosexuality: just ask Carolyn Groff, whose son Russell died at age 26 from AIDS after getting involved in a homosexual “relationship.” (I suppose “gay” apologists like Burroway would ascribe Russell’s premature death to “unsafe sex” — anything to avoid implicating homosexual behavior as especially risky.) Future Russell Groffs — and their loved ones — can be spared if children are warned of the dangers of homosexual practices. But they will be multiplied if the fiction is perpetuated by our government — at every level, especially through the schools — that all sexual lifestyles are equally fraught with danger.

The nation’s top doctor must tell the truth about the immense health risks associated with homosexual/bisexual/transgendered behaviors — not contribute to the liberal state of denial that precludes such a discussion. True compassion requires telling the hard truths, and lives are literally in the balance. We never said that Dr. Holsinger’s 1991 church paper was perfect or that it was the final word on homosexual health risks, but it is the start of a national discussion that is long overdue. So is the simple fact that homosexuals — “gays and lesbians” — can leave that lifestyle behind — another truth that Holsinger (once?) embraced and that earned him the fury of “fundamentalist” homosexual militants like Wayne Besen.

We expected more courage from Dr. Holsinger, a Christian man, than to play the tired, old Washington game of avoiding controversial moral (and health) issues using Clinton-esque evasions. How refreshing it would have been had he instead used his bully pulpit to answer Sen. Kennedy forthrightly about the very real risks linked to “gay” behaviors like anal sodomy — citing new data from 1991 to the present.

Christians and moral traditionalists are rightly concerned about being boxed out of the public square by secular-minded liberals — but the price to be “allowed in” must never be to deny our Biblically-informed conscience.

And so we reverse ourselves and urge the Senate to deny confirmation to Dr. James Holsinger for U.S. Surgeon General, with the proviso that we will return to his side should he discover the internal fortitude to put truth above politics and speak out on the special health hazards of homosexuality.