President Bush’s recent nomination of Dr. James Holsinger for Surgeon General has drawn a lot of criticism. In 1991, Holsinger wrote a paper for a committee of the United Methodist Church studying homosexuality entitled “Pathophysiology of Male Homosexuality.” Holsinger cited and quoted from a few studies and concluded thus:
When the complementarity of the sexes is breached, injuries and diseases may occur as noted above. Therefore, based on the simplest known anatomy and physiology, when dealing with the complementarity of the human sexes, one can simply say, Res ipsa loquitur – the thing speaks for itself!
Holsinger compares human sexuality to pipe fittings; some pipes fit right and some don’t. Res ipsa loquitur!
The idea of a “natural complementarity” of the sexes has been a recurrent theme in anti-gay discourse for decades. The point of the idea is to suggest that, in addition to moral and religious objections to homosexual acts, nature itself condemns them. “Anatomy” and “physiology” tell us, on this view, that there’s something objectively wrong with homosexuality. Holsinger’s paper was thus an attempt to give some patina of scientific legitimacy to long-standing, essentially religious condemnations.
Besides the highly problematic idea of appeals to some conception of “nature,” “anatomy,” or “physiology” as a basis for normative conclusions, it turns out that Holsinger’s paper shares another problem common to much anti-gay literature: it’s junk science. Jim Burroway has checked Holsinger’s sources and found lots of problems with the paper. He concludes:
The whole point of Holsinger