“AIDS: An Interview with James Jekel, M.D.”, The Presbyterian Journal, January 11, 1984.
by Dr. Ralph Blair
It is suspect why, in a cover article on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, a Christian magazine solicits a “public health surgeon” to respond to a complicated theological question: “Do you see venereal diseases … as a form of God’s judgment?” Jekel is a professor of public health whose own research emphasis has been in the “evaluation of health programs”. He indicates no particular experience with AIDS. I suppose he was chosen for the interview because he is a member of an Orthodox Presbyterian congregation. The magazine is aimed at people in that denomination as well as those in the Presbyterian Church in America and other conservative and separatist Presbyterians.
Though Jekel criticizes Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret Heckler for making a statement on AIDS when she is not, in his words, “a public health professional”, Jekel hardly hesitates in plunging into an exposition of scripture though he is not a “professional” exegete. He pulls back some, and confesses “it’s a bit presumptuous for me to say, ‘Yes, I know this is what God is doing’. I am not privy to His inner thoughts”. But Jekel does rush ahead where biblical scholars are not hasty to follow. Claiming that he is “privy to what [God] says in His Word”, Jekel insists that, “in His Word He did say that there would be negative consequences upon those who practiced homosexuality (male homosexuality).” He hedges, stopping short of a condemnation of female homosexuality – perhaps because lesbians are not contracting AIDS. (But what about males down through centuries of homosexual activity? Why was AIDS not a “negative consequence” for them? What about non-homosexual cases of AIDS, e.g., the large number of AIDS cases in Zaire where it is being transmitted heterosexually, apparently from females to males?) Jekel states: “AIDS is certainly compatible with those [biblical] consequences. So I have no trouble thinking of it that way – but I’m not going to say God designed this to punish the homosexual”. As a physician, Jekel is clearly uncomfortable making the link between AIDS and “God’s judgment”. He says: “I personally would like to be focusing more upon the spiritual rather than the physical side of things.” But why, then, does a medical doctor do the interview? Surely there are more qualified exegetes the magazine could have found. And did it occur to the editor to interview a gay Christian with AIDS? Or might the Journal have interviewed an AIDS doctor or a representative of the Centers for Disease Control?
Continuing in the theological vein, Jekel modifies the impact of his antigay judgment when he owns that, “all of our illness in one sense or another is the result of sin”. But why then make a special case out of homosexuality? He suggests that public funding for AIDS research is as legitimate as public funding for research on other diseases – though it is admitted that some Christians disagree. Jekel says we should “be willing to treat AIDS patients as human beings – perhaps mixed up, certainly sinful – but who is not?” Again, there is this note of common ground between all Christians and all people with AIDS, undercutting but not entirely doing away with the neat certitude that AIDS is peculiarly “God’s judgment” on gay men.
Perhaps the most surprising part of the interview is Jekel’s separation of “two issues” by which he further seriously damages the link of “God’s judgment” with “male homosexuality”. He reasons with epidemiologic good sense as well as with perhaps a little better exegetical analysis: “I think it is the [level of promiscuity among many male homosexuals] which is being judged by God more than sexual preference”. Surely it is the high incidence of promiscuity that is spreading AIDS epidemically, even though each person with AIDS is not necessarily highly promiscuous. In contrast to the monogamous gay couple where “AIDS is not a problem”, Jekel asserts that, “what is being ‘judged’ by AIDS is promiscuity”. One wonders why “judged” is in quotation marks. And is Jekel leaving the door ajar for a Christian blessing on monogamous gay relationship? His argument seems to do so, though unintentionally, but he is quick to counter: “Not that [such monogamous relationship] is pleasing to God, but … .” But that he makes such a distinction at all may be significant.
It is surprising too, that the interview went as graciously as it did, for it is introduced by chillingly insensitive comments by Joel Belz, the editor. Beside a photograph of a baby with AIDS, Belz writes: “We feature an issue which a decade ago we would probably not have thought appropriate for this magazine. We have been remembering the uneasy feeling Dr. G. Aiken Taylor had in 1977 after interviewing singer Anita Bryant, who was opposing the homosexual community in Miami. He was wondering: “How would Journal readers respond to discussion of the distasteful subject?” (Notice that homosexuals and gay civil rights are what Belz finds so “distasteful”, and not the discrimination homosexuals suffered and continue to suffer.) Belz says that “Back then, of course, none of us had heard of AIDS, in some ways an even less savory topic. … It’s easy to say, as some Christian leaders have, ‘Let’s keep our distance!’” (As religious people did when Jesus embraced the leper [Mark 1:40ff] in violation of Leviticus 13:45f?) Belz then asks: “And what about a little girl like this one, who has the disease through no fault of her own?” Neither Belz nor Jekel tries to tell us why the little baby has AIDS. Why do they think they know the reason that some young men who are gay “through no fault of their own” have now contracted a deadly disease that they did not seek, while so many other gay men have not contracted it? Know-it-all Christians should not so easily forget Jesus’ comment on the 18 people who died under the tower of Siloam. (Luke 13:4)