by Chandler Burr

About the author: Chandler Burr is a journalist and contributing editor to U.S. News & World Report.

Dr. Tom Coburn, a low-key 50-year-old family general practitioner who practices obstetrics, mostly for Medicaid patients, in Muskogee, Oklahoma, is the front-runner for the title of Gay Activists’ Public Enemy Number One. It is a designation he is happy to contend for.

In his other job as a Republican congressman (“not my profession, I’m a doctor”), Coburn is the author and primary sponsor of HR-1062, The AIDS Prevention Act of 1997. All the major liberal, civil-liberties, gay, and AIDS organizations—the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association, National Organization for Women (NOW), the AIDS Action Council, Gay...