Rev. Sinkford spoke at the Lafayette Park rally.
Rev. Sinkford, outside the office of the Global AIDS Coordinator, called for implementation of effective HIV prevention programs.
Unitarian Universalists from Baltimore joined Rev. Sinkford in DC.
Sinkford in Washington, DC, for World AIDS Day; Calls on Government to Confront HIV/AIDS
November 30, 2007
On Friday, November 30, the eve of World AIDS Day, the Reverend William G. Sinkford, president of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA), joined hundreds of activists in the nation's capital to call for greater governmental leadership in confronting HIV/AIDS at home and abroad.
The day started at a meeting with high level leadership in the Office of the Global AIDS Coordinator (OGAC), an entity within the State Department whose mission is to lead implementation of the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). Rev. Sinkford was joined in that meeting by Serra Sippel, Director of the Center for Health and Gender Equity (CHANGE), and Rob Keithan, Director of the UUA Washington Office for Advocacy. Together they urged the Office to fund comprehensive, integrated, and evidence-based HIV prevention programs, and especially to support congressional efforts aimed at removing the earmark in PEPFAR which requires that one-third of funding goes to abstinence-until-marriage programs. Rev. Sinkford emphasized the religious support for effective programs, based on the moral responsibility to put evidence and human lives ahead of ideology.
The response from OGAC, with some exceptions, was predictable and disappointing. The representatives agreed that some of the four-year-old guidelines need to be rewritten to account for new data and developments, yet maintained their support for the abstinence-only earmark. They also acknowledged that marriage alone does not prevent transmission, yet promoting marriage remains a major focus of many programs.
Following the meeting, Rev. Sinkford, Sippel and Keithan joined a rally outside the building where they called on OGAC to cut the red tape and start funding effective HIV prevention program. Rev. Sinkford took the megaphone and again emphasized the religious support for effective programs. He then joined over 400 George Washington University students as they marched by OGAC on their way to the main World AIDS Day rally at the White House.
In Washington, DC's Lafayette Park, just across the street from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, an even larger crowd chanted and held signs aloft as speakers, and performers called for more effective measures at the local, national, and international level. Eleanor Holmes Norton, Washington, DC's non-voting representative in Congress, called on the President and Congress to stop promoting abstinence-only measures and let other nations, as well as the District of Columbia, determine their own funding and program priorities. Many speakers called on Congress to repeal a budget provision that prohibits the District of Columbia from spending any of its own money on needle exchange programs, even though intravenous drug use is the third-highest cause of HIV transmission.
Standing behind a podium symbolically wrapped in red tape, Rev. Sinkford called on the president and Congress to confront HIV/AIDS with truth. He ended his remarks and closed the rally in prayer, saying, "My prayer on World AIDS Day is that we will summon the moral courage to honestly confront the spread of HIV/AIDS. My prayer is that we will open our minds and our hearts. My prayer is that our intelligence, our compassion, and our tolerance will allow us to face the truth. Because only the truth—not ideology, not wishful thinking—only the truth will help us end the HIV/AIDS pandemic."
For more information contact la_bglt @ uua.org.
Last updated on Thursday, December 6, 2007.
