Word: koop
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...Koop might have remained just another bureaucrat if it had not been for AIDS. As the disease grew to near epidemic proportions, the Administration had to do something. Conservatives breathed a sigh of relief when in 1986 the President handed the job to the Fundamentalist Christian Surgeon General...
After getting assurances that he would be the sole author of the report, Koop took to the task with an open mind, consulting Government experts like the National Institutes of Health's Dr. Anthony Fauci and inviting more than 25 groups, from gay activists to the Southern Baptist Convention, to his office. He wrote 26 drafts at the stand-up desk in the basement of the brick house he rents on the campus of the NIH. He numbered the copies he took to a meeting at the White House and collected all of them to prevent leaks. The next...
...They were particularly outraged that he did not preach abstinence alone and refer euphemistically to body fluids rather than semen. "The White House doesn't like the C word. But if you don't talk about condoms, people are going to die. So I talk." Liberals were amazed that Koop had produced a reasoned report with such compassion for homosexuals, whom he had once called antifamily. Phyllis Schlafly, who said the report sounded as if it had been edited by a gay-rights group, lashed out against Koop and led a campaign against him. Her efforts culminated in the boycott...
...Koop says no one should be surprised, that the report is consistent with his moral view that you can hate sin but love the sinner. "I am the Surgeon General, not the chaplain, of all the people, and that includes homosexuals," he says. He outraged conservatives again in January. Although opposed to abortion morally, Koop concluded, following an 18-month study undertaken after President Reagan promised right-to-life leaders a report, that the evidence just wasn't there to condemn the practice as psychologically harmful...
Despite his success in Washington, Koop's real calling is medicine. By the time he was five, he knew he wanted to be a doctor like his uncle. At 15, he ! would take the subway on weekends from Brooklyn to Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan, pinch a white lab coat, and take a seat in the balcony of the operating room, transfixed for hours by amputations and appendectomies. Back home, while his father was at the office, he would persuade his mother to help her precocious only child round up stray cats and dump them into a sterile trash...