When Political Correctness toward Homosexuals Stops Doctors from Doing Their Jobs

The problem has now reached academic journals and the U.S. military.

By Michael Brown Published on November 10, 2015

Imagine this scene if you will.

A respected doctor and medical professor serving at a large hospital becomes concerned as he documents increasing health risks related to obesity. But as he is compiling data to document this, he is astonished to see that his hospital actively supports fast-food restaurants and even encourages participation in pro-obesity events.

When he protests the hospital’s actions and shares his concerns, he is fired for his lack of sensitivity to fat people. He is even accused of holding to prejudicial views and, to prevent this from happening again in the future, the hospital institutes obesity sensitivity training for all employees, including doctors.

Does this sound completely far-fetched?

On the one hand, it is completely fictional, although there has been a “fat acceptance” movement in America for some years.

On the other hand, with a few minor changes, it is completely true.

The doctor in question is Paul Church, a urologist on the Harvard-affiliated Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center staff in Boston for almost 30 years. He is also a member of the Harvard Medical School faculty.

As reported by MassResistance, Dr. Church “has also spoken before educational and civic groups on the subject of high-risk sexual behaviors,” and, “Over a decade ago, Dr. Church became concerned about the hospital’s aggressive promotion of and involvement in LGBT activities — including Boston’s annual ‘Gay Pride Week’ — and its emphatic push for staff participation in them. He felt compelled to speak out.”

As a urologist, he began to document the increased health risks relating to homosexual sexual acts. He also took exception to the hospital’s open and even aggressive support of gay pride events, finding this not only morally offensive on a personal level but hypocritical and contradictory on a professional level.

Would the hospital promote “pride” events for cigarette smokers or obese children? Then why would it promote gay pride events if the health risks of homosexual sex were documented and well-known?

Yet for his actions, Dr. Church was fired by the hospital.

How dare he offend people by speaking the truth about their health. How dare he not put gay feelings before gay health.

MassResistance explained that the hospital’s “Medical Executive Board claimed that Dr. Church’s statements to colleagues about the medical dangers of homosexual behavior, and moral issues surrounding it, were ‘offensive’ and constituted ‘discrimination,’ ‘harassment’ and ‘unprofessional conduct.’”

Let those words sink in.

As a highly trained doctor, to warn of health risks associated with certain behaviors and to protest his hospital’s aggressive support of those who engage in those behaviors is to be offensive and to engage in discrimination, harassment and unprofessional conduct.

To date, despite Dr. Church’s appeals, his firing has been upheld.

Moving from Boston to Washington, D.C., it was reported on October 30, “With the number of gay and transgender people on the upswing in the District of Columbia, city council members want to force doctors to take cultural competency classes to better accommodate them.”

In fact, five other states already require this, almost guaranteeing that doctors like Dr. Church would not be able to warn about related health risks in those states.

As explained by Laquandra Nesbitt, director of the D.C. Department of Health, The training “helps you to identify skills that help you to have interactions that are not offensive to people of other cultures.”

So, just as it would presumably be offensive to tell fat people that their obesity was detrimental to their health, it would be just as offensive — if not more so — to tell a gay man that some of his preferred sexual acts were detrimental to his health.

But isn’t that exactly what physicians are supposed to do? To consider the health of the patient to be more important than the feelings of the patient?

That’s obviously not the case when it comes to LGBT patients.

The worst sin is to offend.

Of course, I’m all for doctors being culturally sensitive to the unique challenges faced by particular groups of people, and part of the proposed training would no doubt be aimed at increasing that sensitivity.

But there’s no doubt that it would also create an atmosphere of extreme hostility to anyone who would dare to “offend” gays by warning them that homosexual acts can be detrimental to their health, while the failure of any doctor to celebrate homosexuality would be deemed a breach of professional conduct.

This is when political correctness becomes deadly.

In similar fashion, it was reported on November 9, “The American Psychological Association has taken the extraordinary step of retracting an in-house journal article that asserted the rate of rape and other sexual trauma among military men was as much as 15 times higher than the Pentagon’s own survey” — and this despite the fact that the article was peer-reviewed before being published.

This time, however, quite mysteriously, peer-review was not enough and “outside scholars” who examined the study “determined that the method for randomly selecting and surveying male combat veterans was flawed.”

How convenient!

Perish the thought of revealing that gay male rape is out of control in the Armed Forces. That would destroy the PC myth of “all positives and no negatives” for homosexuals serving openly in the military, and at all costs, the myth must be upheld, regardless of how many servicemen suffer.

The medical world and the psychological world must bow down to the gods of political correctness, and this is when it becomes downright deadly.

But if we love life and care about people, we need to speak the truth, even when it hurts. Sometimes the painful truth is the very thing needed to produce healing.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Like the article? Share it with your friends! And use our social media pages to join or start the conversation! Find us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, MeWe and Gab.

Inspiration
Military Photo of the Day: Standing Guard on USS New York
Tom Sileo
More from The Stream
Connect with Us