There were ribbon sales, candlelight vigils, benefit concerts and educational forums. Film screenings, art exhibitions, and balloon releases.
Across the globe, for the 18th year in a row, Dec. 1 marked World AIDS Day. And in Utah, the day began with a faith leadership breakfast at Salt Lake City's Little America Hotel - an event that drew some 75 faith leaders and health officials.
"World AIDS Day is a time of mourning and remembrance," said the Rev. Tom Goldsmith, of the First Unitarian Church in Salt Lake City, in a news conference after the breakfast. "It's also a time of hope, where we - as an interfaith community - have an inordinate responsibility to be leaders."
Sponsored by the Salt Lake Interfaith Roundtable and the Utah Department of Health, the goal of the morning was to illustrate how working to defeat HIV and AIDS needs to be a multi-pronged approach. Especially in the face of the numbers: Forty million people are living with HIV worldwide. In Utah, the HIV numbers have tripled since 2001, from 36 that year to 102 projected for 2005.
Alex M. Azar II, deputy secretary at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, flew in from Washington to attend the breakfast. "You use any tool you can to reach people and promote AIDS prevention, awareness, testing and treatment," he explained. The Rev. Lee Shaw of West Valley City's St. Stephen's Episcopal Church challenged the community to go a step further, beyond prevention and into "the promotion of healthy and stable relationships."
"Families come in a variety of shapes and sizes," including gay couples or single gay parents, "and the faith community is in the unique position to reach out to all kinds of families and help them have a stable, loving environment," he said. And that means "equal rights for all families, equal standing under the law for health insurance, death benefits and adoptions . . . so all families are treated equally and we don't have second-class families anymore," Shaw said.
The Utah breakfast drew visitors from afar, including Deborah Parham Hopson, associate administrator of the HIV/AIDS Bureau of the federal Health Resources and Services Administration. She said she has traveled to areas where the number of HIV and AIDS cases soar. But this year, she said, she wanted to come to a place with lower incident rates to make the point that no area is immune from the dangers of HIV/AIDS.
"I've done New York. I've done California," she said as she left the news conference. "But HIV is here. . . . Yeah, it is here, in Utah. So let's talk about it and keep it a low incident state."
In addition to the morning events, there was an art display at Salt Lake Community College, a reception and fund-raiser at Hotel Monaco, and a worship and healing service at Holladay United Church of Christ.
Representatives from HHS also had a courtesy visit with the presidencies of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Afterward, they met with Elder Robert C. Oaks of the Presidency of the Seventy of the LDS Church, who discussed and shared materials on AIDS prevention and treatment that he'd developed for use in Africa.
To learn more about HIV and AIDS, and for additional resources, future events and free HIV testing sites, visit http://www.aidsinfoutah.org.
