Religious leaders expose damning attitudes towards HIV/AIDS

African religious leaders admitted on Sunday that their own institutions were sometimes guilty of spreading the stigma attached to HIV/AIDS. Christian and Muslim leaders attending the 13th International Conference on AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Infections in Africa, being held on 21-26 September in Nairobi, Kenya, spoke of damning attitudes to the virus that were spread by their churches and mosques. Sheikh Al Haj Yussuf Murigu, Vice-Chair of the Muslim Supreme Council of Kenya, said HIV was equated with "a curse", and those who lived with it were viewed as "sinners". Bishop Otsile Osimilwe said the church tended to point a finger at people living with HIV, instead of adopting a caring and compassionate response. Father Peter Lwaminda, a Roman Catholic priest, said it was "a question of condemnation". "Many religious leaders I have met have inspired fear into people," he said. An Anglican priest living with HIV, Rev Jape Heath, linked the stigma and discrimination to what he described as his church's double standards when it came to the concept of 'sin'. Lying and cheating on tax returns were considered "socially acceptable", he said, while being HIV positive was equated with being caught in adultery. "The church has been exceptionally good at judgmentalism," Heath said. "The role of the stigma has been to see an increase of the pandemic" because people were too scared to be tested for HIV. The Anglican church looked upon those living with HIV as sinners who could be "written off", he said. "That has been the church's major contribution to the stigma attached to HIV." Misogyny and lack of gender equality had also contributed to the spread of the virus, the conference heard, by not allowing women to make choices about their lives. "The church has been quite behind in dealing with gender injustice," said Dr Musa Dube, a Christian theologian. "Every culture that is patriarchal exposes women to HIV." UNAIDS estimates that 60 percent of HIV-positive women in Africa believed themselves to be in monogamous relationships and were therefore infected by unfaithful partners. Dube said it was imperative for religious leaders to educate themselves about HIV/AIDS and for their churches to give them training sessions and educational materials to do so. Theology also needed to be developed that could support a compassionate attitude towards people living with HIV, and it needed to be explained in a language that they could understand, she added. "We religious leaders are part of the problem," Dube said.