When Monica Goodling, a Regent Law School graduate like multitudes of others in the Bush administration, got into legal trouble, she did not hire a lawyer who graduated from Regent’s, a bottom-tier law school–her lawyer graduated from Emory, a top-tier school. That’s what people do–when they need a job done, they try to get the person who is best at what they do. That’s why they hired Goodling–not for her legal credentials, but for her right-wing Christian credentials. But when she needed a lawyer, she hired someone with credentials in Law.

So when you hire a Surgeon General, you want to hire the best person for that job. In a serious administration, that person will be someone who is a serious doctor, a staunch scientist, someone who understands medicine to a tee and knows what is best for the health of Americans. But most of all, it has to be someone in whom you would have absolute confidence, someone you would go to yourself if you had a serious medical condition and needed the best help.

That is not the person that the Bush administration is now considering for the job. In what one would assume is by now a matter of course, they have chosen someone based not on their professionalism or knowledge, instead they have chosen based more strongly on religious and partisan political considerations.

One example: this nominee, James Holsinger, is anti-gay, having voted, as a member of his church’s judicial council, to eject an openly gay pastor from his church. But more to the point is this, found by BarbinMD at DailyKos:

[Holsinger and his wife] founded Hope Springs Community Church in a warehouse at 1109 Versailles Road. Calhoun called it a socially diverse congregation with a “very vital recovery ministry.” It serves the homeless and those with addictions to drugs, alcohol and sex; and it has a Spanish-language Hispanic congregation with its own pastor. […]

Hope Springs also ministers to people who no longer wish to be gay or lesbian, Calhoun said.

“We see that as an issue not of orientation but of lifestyle,” he said. “We have people who seek to walk out of that lifestyle.”

In other words, Holsinger is of the crowd who, with no scientific backing whatsoever, believe that homosexuality is a psychological or moral aberrance which can be cured, reversed.

Holsinger also has less-than-sterling credentials as a medical administrator. While chief medical director of the Department of Veterans Affairs, mismanagement led to the deaths of six patients, and serious problems were found at more than 30 hospitals. Holsinger’s take: the system was “obviously not perfect.”

Well, at least it’s a comfort to know that your doctor can recognize the obvious.