Archimedes, AIDS and Antigay Antagonists
by Dr. Ralph Blair
AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome) has had much coverage in the press. Interviewed in USA Today, Ann Landers’ opening remark was: “Everybody wants to know about AIDS”. This is understandable in view of terrifying rumors. For Christian media, discipleship demands that lies be eschewed and much needed facts be reported fairly. Because justice has not been what we have found in the coverage of AIDS in the fundamentalist press, to say nothing of sensationalism in secular yellow journalism, I am departing from my usual format to try to clarify perspective for readers of REVIEW.
Archimedes said that we need only one fixed point in order to move the whole Earth. Long understood in philosophy, this principle has been verified now in psychological research. “Preconceived notions bias the way information is interpreted,” as social psychologist David G. Myers explains in Christianity Today. Not surprisingly, antigay fundamentalists need only their preconceived negative notion on homosexuality to turn medical data on AIDS upside down so that AIDS becomes God’s judgment against homosexuals. Not surprising, they fail to preach against heterosexuality when women die in childbirth. Not surprising, they did not interpret as God’s judgment, the fatal infection that struck down the veterans at an American Legion convention. They do not interpret Sickle Cell Anemia as God’s curse on blacks. They do not interpret Tay-Sachs disease as God’s curse on Jews. Preconceived culture-bound ideas determine what, at any particular time, they (and we) see or do not see as “God’s judgment”.
Fundamentalists do not get stirred up over loss of life per se. Jerry Falwell favors the death penalty to kill the “guilty” and he advocates a massive buildup of U. S. nuclear arms that would kill millions of innocent people. He calls for the re-election of the Senate’s most outspoken supporter of deadly cigarettes known to cause more than 75 percent of all lung cancer and to be responsible for more than 325,000 premature deaths each year. Rather than interpreting these deaths as God’s judgment against smokers or the immoral cigarette establishment, Falwell warns that, “If [Jesse Helms] were not to be re-elected next year, the whole nation will be set back in my opinion five to ten years in the battle to return this country to moral sanity”. He and Helms rightly deplore abortion, but they overlook the fact that smoking causes spontaneous abortion and stillbirth.
When it comes to a deadly disease among gay men, however, Falwell mounts his podium to self-righteously denounce people with AIDS as evidence of God’s judgment. When the spiritually blind disciples came upon a man blind from birth and asked Jesus: “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9:1ff), remember that Jesus rejected both alternatives. For all practical purposes, homosexuals might just as well have been born homosexual, but blind fundamentalists are still babbling over “who sinned”.
Immunosuppression can be caused by malnutrition, exposure to the sun, organ transplant and other factors. In the case of AIDS, the cause is unknown. AIDS patients are rendered defenseless against disease. AIDS has occurred within a relatively closed circle of individuals and seems to be spread from one person to another through the exchange of body fluids. It is not easily contagious and not transmitted in ordinary social contact or through the air. But it must be clearly understood that AIDS is not synonymous with gay sex, just as an infection that passes from a husband to his wife during sex is not synonymous with heterosexual sex. It is currently estimated that only one in 10,000 homosexuals has contracted AIDS. As of this writing, 743 deaths have been attributed to AIDS; almost all of them gay men and intravenous drug users.
AIDS is a terrible experience for the specific population at risk but it is surely not a cause for further persecution of that population. Evangelicals should be ashamed when statements such as the following are made in our name: “To add insult to sodomy, those who cry in the streets for ‘Gay Rights’ are now screaming for you and me to come up with millions of dollars in tax money to find a cure for the diseases spread by their continuing iniquities”. (World MAP Digest editorial, July/August 1983, p. 5)
And one day we all will ask: “But when did we see YOU sick?” (Matt 25:31-46)