Jakes Challenges Churches To End Silence on AIDS

      (Taylor Media Services)—Following a meeting in New York City last week, some of the nation’s most prominent Black ministers committed themselves to a new campaign to combat the AIDS epidemic in the African American community. The gathering organized by the National Black Leadership Commission on AIDS also called upon the federal government to declare HIV/AIDS among Blacks a public health emergency.
      Popular minister Bishop T.D. Jakes spoke for the group saying, “Just as African American clergy fervently came together 50 years ago to fight for civil rights, we are banding together today to bring an end to HIV/AIDS and its potential to obliterate our community.”
     

Bishop T.D. Jakes

    According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, black males are diagnosed with AIDS at a rate 8 times that for white men and black women are diagnosed at a rate 23 times that for white women. However, there are critics who charge that too much emphasis on AIDS tends to portray Blacks in a negative light.
      In a strongly worded commentary written exclusively for the Black Press of America, Jakes makes an appeal to Black churches around the nation to join a unified strategy to deal with the pandemic of HIV/AIDS in the Black Community.
     “We are on the roof again,” states the pastor of more than 30,000 at the Potter’s House in Dallas, recalling the long wait of African-Americans to be rescued during Hurricane Katrina. In that crisis, Blacks largely had to save each other and themselves.
      ''I realize that as Sen. [Hillary]Clinton stated, if this were killing Whites in the way it is killing Blacks, it wouldn’t be their pastors who would have to take on such a daunting task and it would not be tithe money but tax money that would be used for resource.''
      The Congressional Black Caucus has committed to drafting a bill that would help fund programs to end the AIDS epidemic in Black America.
     “These funds would include all of our tax dollars that have been directed elsewhere while we die,” Jakes writes in his commentary.

     Jakes commends many churches for having spent thousands of dollars to address the rising rate of HIV/AIDS. But he calls upon those who may have resisted involvement due to long-held stigmas and prejudices about the disease that once appeared to predominantly plague homosexuals. Stats outlined in the commentary shows that HIV/AIDS is now ravaging Black heterosexuals —particularly Black women—at astronomical rates.
     “We must work to get all groups to a healthy condition,” writes Jakes. “We cannot care just for those we agree with. We must help all hurting people to safety and then debate later the many complications of our times.”

NNPA staff contributed to this story.

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