Bush’s Homophobic Surgeon General Nominee Charged With Conflicts Of Interest - Funnels Millions From Church
Ilena Rose
By: Logan Murphy on Saturday, September 1st, 2007 at 9:01 AM - PDT
George Bush’s nominee for Surgeon General has drawn a lot of heat
for among other things, his crack-pot anti-gay views as a leader in
the United Methodist affiliate of the Institute on Religion and
Democracy. But a new report may finally sink his already controversial
nomination in a sea of conflicts of interest that have marked his
career.
Dr. James Holsinger has also been a longtime leader of the
Confessing Movement in the United Methodist Church. The Confessing
Movement is a rightwing “renewal group” affiliated with the
Washington, DC-based Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD), whose
purpose for a generation has been to divide and disrupt the historic
churchs of mainline protestantism in the interests of advancing
neoconservatism and the religious right.
Holsinger was elected to the highest court in the Methodist Church
a time when the IRD-affiliated church “renewal” groups had launched
efforts to use church judicial systems to enforce their notions of
orthodoxy, particularly on matters related to homosexuality.
Now, an investigation Rev. Andrew J. Weaver, Ph.D. and Lawrence H.
McGaughey, Esq., and published at Media Transparency, shows that
Holsinger used the sale of a United Methodist Church-owned hospital in
Kentucky, as a cash cow for his personal ambitions. It took years of
litigation by the church to find out what had happened to its money,
only to learn that Holsinger had diverted millions to endow
professorships at the Chandler Medical Center at the University of
Kentucky where he served as Chancellor and fundraiser-in-chief. Read
more…