U.S. Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois told more than 2,000 evangelical leaders in Orange County on Friday that he "respectfully but unequivocally" disagrees with those who oppose condom distribution to fight the AIDS pandemic. But he said a solution to the worldwide spread of AIDS would also come from churches guiding people to make moral decisions.
Obama, a Democrat weighing a run for the White House, made his remarks at an evangelical AIDS conference sponsored by Saddleback Church in Lake Forest.
Some conservatives, offended by Obama's support for legal abortion, had called on the mega-church's pastor, Rick Warren, to rescind his invitation to the senator.
Yet Obama drew a standing ovation from the 2,072 pastors and others who came from 39 states and 18 nations to explore church solutions to the AIDS pandemic, which has killed 25 million people worldwide. In measured words, he dismissed the notion that simply discouraging promiscuity could stop the spread of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
"We can't ignore the fact that abstinence and fidelity, although the ideal, may not always be the reality -- that we're dealing with flesh and blood men and women and not abstractions, and that if condoms and, potentially, things like microbicides, can prevent millions of deaths, then they should be made more widely available," he said.
He recalled traveling last summer to Kenya and South Africa, where he said he heard "stories of men and women contracting HIV because sex was no longer part of a sacred covenant, but a mechanical physical act; because men had visited prostitutes and then brought the disease home to their wives, or young girls had been subjected to rape and abuse. These are issues of prevention we can't walk away from."
But Obama also noted the power of religion to slow the spread of HIV. Churches, he said, must offer "a moral framework with a faith basis to make better choices."
"Let me say this loud and clear: I don't think that we can deny that there is a moral and spiritual component to prevention, that in too many places all over the world where HIV/AIDS is prevalent -- including, by the way, right here in the United States -- the relationship between men and women, between sexuality and spirituality, has broken down, and needs to be repaired," he said.
