It seems that my outfit today is appropriate all around, red for Christmas and red for World AIDS Day. Of course, I didn’t plan it this way—it was more the misfortune of realizing that a button was missing from the pants I originally intended to wear. But I’m glad things worked out.

When I was in, say, middle school, I recall being really scared of HIV/AIDS. That would have been in the early ‘90s, when testing positive seemed an automatic death sentence. I remember hearing that Magic Johnson, the basketball player, had tested positive for HIV and wondering how long it might take him to die. As far as I know, he’s still alive and doing pretty well.

In my insulated little Eastern Washington town, sex ed was non-existent (I’ve heard others’ stories about applying condoms to a banana, but remember more of my high school teacher’s laments about pot smoking in the ‘60s than anything I learned about sex in that class), and I had never met anyone with AIDS. I’m still not sure that I have in person, to be honest with you, but at least now I know enough about the disease to not be afraid of the people who have it. For instance, you can’t get HIV from hugging a positive person, sharing a water fountain or cutlery with her or him, or kissing. There are only four ways to get it, in fact:

1.Unprotected sex with an infected person
2.Sharing needles or other contaminated skin-piercing equipment
3.Blood and blood products (like blood transfusions and organ transplants)
4.Mother to baby, either in womb, coming out, or through breastfeeding

But you all probably already know that—even my high school classes weren’t quite that isolated.

We don’t talk about HIV/AIDS too often in the faith community, maybe because it ties into our major hot-button issue, sexuality. Some of us shout, “More condoms!,” while others (in addition to words of hate against LGBT folk, some of whom are our sisters and brothers in the Body of Christ) scream back, “Abstinence only!”

And while we’re shouting back and forth about that, five people are dying of AIDS every minute. For a woman in sub-Saharan Africa, in a heterosexual marriage where she doesn’t have the right to refuse sex or use a condom, a woman whose husband may be cheating on her, our arguments here in the United States don’t really solve much.

In fact, the United Nations just yesterday issued a press release highlighting the underlying linkages between women’s rights and risk of infection. A stretch? Well, take a look at this quote from the report:

“Thus, the factors that increase women's vulnerability to infection are numerous. Among these, the inability to secure adequate housing and living conditions need to be recognized as significant. Women's economic vulnerability often translates as dependence on men for survival, and many women are forced into situations that increase vulnerability to sexual violence, or to engage in unsafe sex in exchange for money, housing or food.”

The release goes on to say that for many women, the death of a husband from AIDS may result in the widow’s forcible eviction from her home. For those with family members living with the disease, too, the brunt of care may fall on women in lieu of societal structures that can help with that burden.

A case in point about women’s rights and AIDS—Malawi, where 14% of the adult population is HIV positive, has implemented a program to test pregnant women and give them drugs to prevent transmission of the disease to their unborn children. The problem? Most women won’t take the test because they fear being beaten or divorced by their husbands if they turn up positive. So the disease rages on.

As American Christians, it is time to stop simply shaping this issue into a black and white “moral values” debate. Condoms don’t help when people won’t use them, and abstinence doesn’t help when people just aren’t going to abstain. There are too many underlying social, cultural, and economic issues standing in the way of those topics right now.

And just maybe, on World AIDS Day, we Christians can get together and agree that human rights for all is one value our Savior unequivocally promoted.

“Wash yourselves;
make yourselves clean;
remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes;
cease to do evil, learn to do good;
seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.”

--Isaiah 1:16-17

Kelsey