Coburn

Mentioned him yesterday, but Salon’s got more on Oklahoma Senate candidate Tom Coburn. He’s already in the House, and is actually ahead in the polls…

For Coburn, the imminent danger facing America is apparently not terrorism but the “gay agenda.” His thumping about this menace within contributed to the pressure that led to Bush’s endorsement of a constitutional amendment to outlaw gay marriage. At a Republican meeting this spring, Coburn warned: “The gay community has infiltrated the very centers of power in every area across this country, and they wield extreme power … That agenda is the greatest threat to our freedom that we face today. Why do you think we see the rationalization for abortion and multiple sexual partners? That’s a gay agenda.”
…
At a House subcommittee meeting on the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1996, which heard testimony on the danger of the parasite cryptosporidium, which had killed 104 and sickened 400,000 in Milwaukee in 1993 and killed 19 in Las Vegas in 1994, Coburn displayed his expertise as a doctor. The lethal spores, he held forth, “can sometimes … be very helpful — for doctors — because it helps us identify those people who in fact are immuno-compromised.”

As a doctor, he also sterilized a woman without her consent, then illegally billed Medicaid for the procedure.
For all his fine contributions, Shrub appointed him chairman of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV and AIDS in 2003.