President George Bush wants another evangelist/homophobe to board his sinking shipthis time it’s Dr. James Holsinger Jr., whom Bush nominated to be the next Surgeon General. Holsinger, the former secretary of the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services and a current health sciences professor at the University of Kentucky, wrote a paper in 1991 that attempted to make a medical argument against homosexuality. Part of his proof: “The logical complementarity of the human sexes has been so recognized in our culture that it has entered our vocabulary in the form of naming various pipe fittings either the male fitting or the female fitting depending on which one interlocks within the other. When the complementarity of the sexes is breached, injuries and diseases may occur.” Holsinger was also one of the founders of a Kentucky church with a ministry that helps “cure” gays. If that weren’t bad enough, as the secretary of the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services, Holsinger presided over one of the unhealthiest states in the country, The Courier Journal of Louisville concluded after a yearlong investigation. “Chronic disease, poverty, government inaction and doctor shortages have created an extremely unhealthy populationa state that is in critical condition,” the report says. Unfortunately, we aren’t surprised that Bush wants to share Holsinger’s expertise with the rest of us.
U.S. Rep. Bob Etheridge was one of several members of Congress who recently traveled to Cuba to explore increased agricultural trade with the island Communist nation and whether to lift the trade embargo that began in 1962 when Fidel Castro became an ally of the former Soviet Union. “I think many of us in our delegation thought that if we’ve been trading with China for years, certainly we ought to be looking at a country 90 miles off our coast,” Etheridge said. “We think we ought to be taking a look at the policy, and Congress ought to be engaged in it.” If Cuba had a market for American products the size of China’s, Congress would have become engaged a long time ago.
