AIDS Tests Love, Faith, Charity of Believers : Disease: For some, reconciling the belief that homosexuality is a sin with compassion for those who are HIV-positive poses a quandary.

The rule is love the sinner, hate the sin. But if the sinner has AIDS--and the sin is homosexuality or sex outside of marriage--can compassion be reconciled with religious doctrine?

If you believe that God condemns homosexual behavior, how do you spread that moral teaching without casting aspersions on people who contracted AIDS through gay sex? Are more lives saved by providing information about condom use, or by promoting abstinence?

For some, the answers are clear. AIDS activists disrupt Masses and destroy sacred hosts as they demand that religious groups give unqualified acceptance of homosexuality. Fundamentalist preachers fill the airwaves with the message that AIDS is God’s punishment for homosexuals and drug users.

Amid these extremes, the faithful seek solutions that are compassionate and true to their beliefs.

“This is a response of God’s people to people being sick. That, to me, has always been the bottom line,” said Ronald H. Sunderland of the Foundation for Interfaith Research and Ministry in Houston. “If you force (other) issues together, you’re going to confront over and over again problems we don’t need to face, and the people who are going to suffer are people with AIDS.”

Judy Hunter, who was a consultant for the Catholic AIDS education curriculum, discusses condoms and homosexuality when she gives AIDS education seminars in dioceses nationwide because “these are the facts about HIV-AIDS.”

But she teaches that “there is no such thing as safe sex,” and draws on her experience leading a support group where one spouse infected another despite the precaution of condom use.

Debra Fraser-Howze of the Black Leadership Commission on AIDS approaches African-American churches with what she calls her “however theory.”

“Abstinence is the only sure way not to get AIDS. We need to start every sentence with that because that’s honest,” Fraser-Howse said.

But it is also true that condoms provide some protection, she said. So she offers pastors an alternative. “Maybe you can’t get up and say it, but there’s no law you can’t let me in the basement and have me say it,” she said.

Compromises that are possible on condom use seem more elusive when the issue is homosexuality.

Presbyterian ACT-UP is planning acts of civil disobedience to challenge the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s stand on homosexuality at its annual meeting in Orlando in June, said the Rev. Howard Warren, one of the group’s moderators. “We must not de-gay the disease,” he says.

But others say it is wrong to ask that Christian and Jewish groups give up biblically based beliefs that homosexuality is a sin just because gays are afflicted.

“Are homosexuals to be excluded from the community of faith? Certainly not. But anyone who joins such a community should know that it is a place of transformation . . . and not merely a place to be comforted or indulged,” Gary, a gay Christian who died of AIDS, wrote in his final letter to Duke Divinity School Prof. Richard Hays.

Earl Shelp helps run an interfaith AIDS program in Houston, in which Southern Baptist, Catholic and Pentecostal churches have been among the religious groups caring for more than 1,000 people with AIDS.

“It’s exploitative for gay people to use AIDS to advance their own agenda,” Shelp said.

At the First Baptist Church of Houston, where more than 30 members are on six AIDS care teams, the Rev. Bill Heston said he is increasingly irritated by fundamentalists who want him to condemn AIDS as God’s judgment and gay activists telling him he has to give his blessing to homosexuality to serve people with the disease.

“We all need to have the right to stand together and define our own position,” Heston said.

Father Rodney DeMartini, executive director of the San Francisco-based National Catholic AIDS Network, said he can understand the frustration of AIDS activists, but he said they also need to recognize that there is hardly a Catholic Charities agency in the country that does not have an AIDS ministry. And many of the larger dioceses have full-time AIDS programs.

He tries to persuade activists to work with the church in such common causes as ensuring that people with AIDS have adequate housing and medical care, rather than attacking the institution for its stand on homosexuality.

“(They) act as if you expect the church to change hundreds of years of teaching just because there is an epidemic. That’s just not going to happen,” he said.

If there is a source of hope, it is the consensus that has been built around the religious responsibility to care for people with AIDS. In caring for individuals, those involved in AIDS ministries say, other differences seem to be less meaningful.

When St. Luke in the Fields Episcopal Church in New York began offering a weekly dinner for eople with AIDS in 1988, “we began with all these nice, middle-class, gay white men. We are now 75% black or Hispanic. I’m sure some of them are gay, but many of them are drug users,” said the Rev. Molly McGreevy.

“Loving people, in the end, is much more important than judging them, much more important,” she said.

Instead of condemning one another, both sides in the debates over AIDS ministries may find it more helpful to forgive one another, said the Rev. David Jaeger, coordinator of AIDS ministry for the archdiocese of Seattle.

“There is a conciliation that is needed: their forgiveness of us for being judgmental and our helping them forgive themselves if they’ve behaved irresponsibly.”