At the recent international AIDS conference held in Toronto, speaker after speaker pointed out that AIDS need not be nearly so widespread and destructive as it is. • Why then is AIDS so widespread and spreading? • The answer you get depends on who you ask, as Andrew Faiz's in-depth report in this issue reveals. Some people blame poverty, some politics. Some point fingers at homosexuals, others at prostitutes and intravenous drug users.
Some blame George W. Bush, some blame popes and other church leaders. Some blame capitalism and international pharmaceutical firms. Others blame Western social liberalism.
From a Christian perspective, broken humanity has a hand in almost every aspect of this disease, including, most glaringly, the economic injustice of extreme poverty.
But if Christians see moral issues in this crisis (and, in itself, this is not wrong), they too often jump to simplistic solutions that involve sin and retribution.
First, not everyone, Christians included, shares these moral values. And if they don't, nothing is solved. Coming to understand that unprotected sex with multiple partners is risky and dangerous to self and others is another matter. (As an aside, most sexual transmission is heterosexual.)
Moreover, the way we treat sexual sins is at odds with how we treat almost every other sin — the attitude of too many people of faith regarding sexuality is that if you're not perfect (chaste within marriage), you get your just desserts.
But besides being doubtful theology, we don't think that way on almost any other topic. No one, for instance, would say a jaywalking person “deserves” to be hit and killed. We don't say poor people “deserve” to go hungry or without medical care. In any case, there isn't an honest person alive who could confess to never having had an “improper” sexual thought, regardless their moral standpoint. So why do the rules appear different for sexual sins and especially HIV?
One of the tests of human maturity is the ability to deal with complex ethical issues that involve competing values. A common test is to ask a child whether it is all right for an impoverished starving person to take food from a store without paying. A child of eight or nine will probably say that stealing is wrong, full stop.
By the time a child reaches 12 or so, however, the issue of poverty and starvation come into play as mitigating factors. It's a sign of maturity to see the complexity of the problems involved: how did the person come to be impoverished and starving? Are there other unexpressed underlying issues? And so on.
Why do we abandon this thinking when it comes to religion where all too easily pigeon-holes framed by inflexible rules for living appear? “There's right and there's wrong, just as we were taught as children,” people will say.
When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I felt as a child: but when I became a man, I ceased those childish ways.
Unquestionably, AIDS has a sexual side and it's folly to ignore that. But to extrapolate that it's God's punishment or that we should not help people because they got what they “deserved” is appalling: It supposes, among other things that we know God's mind and will for individuals.
But if the spread of AIDS is caused by many factors, there is a troubling underlying cause. What links all of the subjects for blame listed above is abuse of power and position.
The sexual side of AIDS is not about homosexuality, it's about male sexuality. Beyond sexuality, it is about male economic and political power and oppression of women.
In India and Africa, it has been evident for years that the spread of the virus follows the trucking routes, where men, married or not, regularly have unprotected sex. Throughout much of sub-Sahara Africa, many men openly subscribe to their right to have sex when and where they want it.
Over the millennia, men have created many cultures, philosophies and religions to support maintaining the upper hand. If Christians are to root out AIDS, males need to put away their childish ways and needs and work with women to establish God's justice for everyone.
It's time for all of us to grow up.
