"Restoration of Values and Families" Essential Part of Solution to HIV/AIDS Epidemic, Opinion Piece Says

The "one answer" to fighting HIV/AIDS "is to re-establish our mooring rooted in personal responsibility and the traditional sense of right and wrong behavior," Star Parker, president of Coalition on Urban Renewal and Education, writes in a Salt Lake City Deseret Morning News opinion piece. Although a recent Newsweek cover story, titled "The New Face of AIDS," "helped bring national attention" to the HIV/AIDS epidemic among black women in the United States, the article's "superficial and biased coverage is itself evidence of the scope of the crisis on which it reports," Parker says. The "breakdown" of traditional values, family, education and law -- the effects of which are "more intense and protracted in the black community than in other communities" -- contribute to the spread of HIV among black women, Parker says. However, "it's important to retain perspective that black social problems are symptomatic of a national problem," Parker writes, adding, "Irresponsible sexual behavior has no racial boundaries." The HIV/AIDS epidemic is "symptomatic of a society spinning out of control," and efforts to fight it should "focus on restoration of values and families in white and black communities," Parker writes, concluding, "It's not an easy task. But if we lose sight that this is the only solution, we truly will be lost" (Parker, Salt Lake City Deseret Morning News, 12/18).

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