The Spirit of Faithfulness | Christianity Today

re: from May 2, 2007, by Debbie Dortzbach, "...The Boston Globe blared the news that Randall Tobias, one of America's most respected leaders in HIV/AIDS prevention, had blown it...[snip]...Tobias represented all that was good about President Bush's war against HIV/AIDS, promoting abstinence, faithfulness, and faith-based participation in the grassroots struggle against the disease in Africa and around the world. He was America's ambassador for AIDS—commissioned to demonstrate the drive for life, not death; the commitment to prevention, not persistent infection; and the generosity of the American government and people to countries crushed by poverty, conflict, and disease....[snip]....Today, my heart is angry and my spirit crushed by the insult of yet another abstinence and faithfulness message ruined by the exposure of improper behavior, whether explicit or peripheral. Once again, the guilty party is a high-profile person, an ambassador to the world to spread the message that sex is protected and fulfilled only in the context of marriage. Our critics waste no time in pointing out what they call our ostrich-in-the-sand thinking. How many times did I hear at the International AIDS Conference in Toronto in July 2006 that "abstinence and faithfulness just don't work!" /When a failure in faithfulness results in AIDS, the harm done goes beyond pain, according to my colleague, Dr. Meredith Long, co-author of our book, The AIDS Crisis: What We Can Do. "AIDS is an insult to our creator," he says "It not only destroys his creation but chooses as its most frequent pathway the gift of our sexuality—God's precious gift of relationship that should be the highest celebration of the life He gave us and the act by which we participate with him in the creation of new life. For the highest celebration of life to be the messenger of death goes beyond destruction—it is a desecration of God's image."..."...