President Bush's choice for surgeon general likely will face questions about his stands on AIDS, sex education and abortion during the confirmation process.
Dr. James Holsinger clearly has some pretty definite views on right and wrong; he's got it straight all right. Dr. Holsinger has made his negative views on homosexuality known for nearly two decades.
- In the early 1990s, Holsinger resigned from the denomination's Committee to Study Homosexuality because he believed the committee "would follow liberal lines," according to Time magazine. At the time, he warned that acceptance of homosexuality would drive away millions of churchgoers.
- As a member of the Judicial Council, he voted with the majority in 2005 that a Virginia pastor could deny church membership to an openly gay man.
Aside from him clearly being "anti-gay," Holsinger’s record is mired with incompetence, zealous conservatism, and, of course, sizable campaign contributions to Republicans.
As Chief Medical Director of the Department of Veterans Affairs under Bush’s father, Dr. Holsinger was neglecting our vets long before Walter Reed made it fashionable.
- A government investigation found “several cases in which incompetence and neglect led to the deaths of patients.” Dr. Holsinger was forced to admit blame for the deaths of six patients in less than a year at a single Chicago hospital alone.
- But the problems weren’t limited to Chicago. In Wyoming, a patient scheduled for surgery for a treatable cancer died after he was ignored for 45 days following the resignation of the staff urologist over a contract dispute. Thirty VA hospitals were found to have “high numbers of patient complications and other indicators of substandard care.”
- A decade later, Dr. Holsinger was appointed Kentucky’s Cabinet Secretary for Health and Family Services. By the end of his tenure, a Kentucky newspaper found that the state was at the bottom of the nation for almost every health measure. Kentuckians die at a rate of 18 percent above the national average, the newspaper reported.
Placing people in positions who are fair, honest, and have a compassion for their work and bettering our culture doesn't seem to be a priority for either the Bush or Fletcher Administrations.
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