Look closely
I had Google Ads on the sidebar, and I’ve got almost no control over
what shows up there. I noticed one easrlier today, with a link to this. It’s a website sponsored by Campus Crusade for Christ.
It’s a profile of a college student on a website dedicated to a very
evangelical version of Christianity — one that, for instance, thinks
that Catholics can be Christians, as long as they enjoy a personal relationship with Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.
It presents a view of various religions, but in the end they all prove
inadequate because they don’t provide a personal relationship with God,
as this Christianity says it does. (I might note that this is a
entirely tautological “critique”, wherein the failing of the religions
that one presents is that they do not match the definition of the
religion they’re pushing. I hope that the college students for
whom this is aimed have enough sense to use their brains in evaluating
this, but my own experience with college students leaves me unsure
whether that will happen.)
But they chose an HIV positive person who’s a hemophiliac as their
spokesperson. Why a hemophiliac? Well, they’re almost the
only “innocent” victims of the plague, because they got the disease in
an entirely passive way — i.e., they did not have sex or shoot
drugs. And there’s a small fop to not blaming the obvious
culprits.
…So initially I decided to
blame the entire homosexual community. Easy cop-out. But after I thought about
it, I realized it’s kind of stupid to blame an entire group of people for my
problem. I then decided to blame God….
(What about the blood bankers who spent the better part of two years in
the early ’80s trying to prevent any controls being placed upon blood
distribution, even in reaction to AIDS, because they knew it would cut
into their profit margins?)
More to the point, the choice of a hemophiliac presents
difficulty. Considering what some conservative Christians have
said in the past regarding HIV, about “innocent” versus “non-innocent”
victims of the scourge, we should be suspicious. I don’t expect
that they would have chosen someone gay, or who had pre-marital sex, or
some other such way — although these are FAR more common than the
hemophilia/blood products transmission route (millions versus a few
thousand). This is calculated to play to the emotions and to a
blame game, to make the version of Christianity that’s being peddled
more attractive, more pathos-laden.
But it seems fundamentally dishonest. And I wish I could say that
I’m surprised. But with this group, I’m not. They’re not
Jerry Falwell, but they’re not Desmond Tutu, either.
I wish Steve Sawyer rest in death. And I feel sorry that he and his story have become used in this way.
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