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TRANSCRIPT:
Episode no. 519
January 11, 2002
BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Coming up, in the rural South, more and more African-American women are being infected with AIDS. Churches admit they've looked the other way.
Reverend MELVIN LEWIS (Pastor, Locust Grove Missionary Baptist Church): Many people feel that is a subject that maybe ought to be left out of the church.
ABERNETHY: And corruption, repression and poverty in Uzbekistan. Could those conditions encourage the same Islamic terrorism the U.S. is trying to fight?
Plus, at an Ivy League college, kosher and halal foods for anyone who wants it.
ABERNETHY: Welcome. I'm Bob Abernethy. It's good to have you with us.
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BOB ABERNETHY: The Archbishop of Canterbury announced his retirement this week. Dr. George Carey says he'll step down in October as spiritual leader of the 70 million Anglicans, among them American Episcopalians. Carey has led the Church of England, mother Church of the Anglican Communion, for more than a decade. During that time the Anglican Church worldwide has faced disagreements over social and theological issues such as homosexuality and women in leadership.
In England, Carey has also tried to deal with continuing decline in church attendance, something he discussed with RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY last year.
Dr. GEORGE CAREY: Our churches must recover their vigor in proclaiming a clear faith for people today, but not a simplistic faith. A faith actually than can be intellectually satisfying as well.
ABERNETHY: Carey's successor will be chosen through a complicated time-honored process. An internal committee nominates two bishops from the Church of England, the British Prime Minister then chooses his favorite, and then, finally, the queen ratifies the choice.
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BOB ABERNETHY: As Boston gears up for a high-profile pedophilia trial against a former Catholic priest, the city's archdiocese has announced a zero-tolerance policy against sexual abuse.
At a news conference Wednesday, Cardinal Bernard Law made a public apology to the more than 130 people who claim to have been abused by former priest John Geoghan. Cardinal Law pledged to fire any priest who sexually abuses a child.
Under the new policy, all clergy and volunteers will be required to report allegations of abuse to both state and church authorities as long as the allegations are disclosed outside the confessional.
Meanwhile, the Vatican has also moved to centralize and toughen guidelines for dealing with child abuse. The changes were released quietly as part of new rules for grave offenses against Church law.
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BOB ABERNETHY: Now, a dilemma in many churches and parishes. Should a pastor offer people any counseling about sex except abstinence outside marriage? Does saying anything about safe sex seem to condone behavior the Bible forbids? It's a real issue in the deep South, especially in black churches, especially regarding women. In Mississippi, for instance, according to the most recent figures, 28 percent of those reporting new HIV infection were heterosexual black women. Our report is from Judy Valente.
JUDY VALENTE: Twenty-year-old Easha Roney spends most days at home keeping house for her uncle. Like many young women in the Mississippi Delta, she never finished high school and can't find a job.
Unidentified Doctor: Any trouble breathing or anything like that?
EASHA RONEY: No.
VALENTE: Sadly, Easha is like a growing number of her peers in another way. Last year she tested positive for HIV.
Ms. RONEY: And I just burst out crying. It was my first time hearing it and I was shocked. I couldn't believe it. I was scared. I mean, I didn't understand how could I get it at a young age. How could somebody did not tell me what was going on with them?
VALENTE: Here where cotton is still king and life for many is a hard scrabble fight for survival, the AIDS epidemic has taken deep root. Nationwide, women now account for a fourth of all newly diagnosed AIDS cases, double the percentage from 10 years ago. A disproportionate number of those women are poor, young, and African-American.
And this poses a particular dilemma for most African American churches.
Reverend MELVIN LEWIS (Pastor, Locust Grove Missionary Baptist Church): We just can't be sanctimonious and cheerful and not be involved. According to Jane, it is the leading cause of death in blacks of our young men and women between the ages of 25 and 44. What are we doing?
VALENTE: Yet African-American churches, a major force in the rural South, have been reluctant to address AIDS prevention, fearing it might undermine the Church's traditional Bible-based teaching on extra-marital sex.
Reverend MILTON GLASS (New Green Grove Baptist Church): We are teaching people against, you know, against sex outside of marriage and fornication and adultery.
Rev. LEWIS: We don't want to encourage it in any way, form, or fashion at all.
VALENTE: Dr. Hamza Brimah, a Nigerian-born physician, is the only AIDS specialist for a nine-county area of the Delta.
Dr. HAMZA BRIMAH (AIDS Specialist): We have some of the worst poverty in the United States of America. I've been on record as describing the Delta as being very similar to Africa in terms of the living conditions, the education. We have some of the highest unemployment here in the Delta. It makes living really hard. There's really nothing to do here. So when young people get bored and have nothing to do and go out and have a few drinks, then what you find next? Sadly, unprotected sex is the next thing that happens.
VALENTE: Dr. Brimah says that young women with few means of support will often enter into sexual relationships with older men with the hope of receiving a small amount of financial help. He recalls what one female patient told him.
Dr. BRIMAH: She said, "No honey, no money." The exchange of sex is often the only essential that, unfortunately, some younger women are left with in order to be able to obtain some money for, you know, the daily essentials of living.
VALENTE: Easha, too, became involved with an older man despite her mother's warning.
Ms. RONEY: My mamma broke down in tears. She couldn't understand why; she couldn't understand the reasons. She was always saying, "Didn't I tell you? Didn't I tell you? Why wouldn't you listen to me? Why wouldn't you listen to me?" And I'd say, "Mom, like you told me, you always learn the hard way." And that's what I did. I learned the hard way.
VALENTE: Because of misinformation about how HIV spreads and fear of getting it, Easha and others who contract the virus are often shunned, even by their own churches.
(to Ms. Roney): Anybody from the church come out to you, extended their hand to you?
Ms. RONEY: Well not extend their hand but they pray. From my church, only one.
Rev. LEWIS: Many people feel that that is a subject that maybe ought to be left out of the Church, left to the social community to get it out when, in fact, it is one of our responsibilities as well. (to Parishioners): And because of the fact that this is AIDS Awareness Day -- weekend, I wanted to bring our attention to something that is relative.
VALENTE: While Reverend Lewis is willing to preach about AIDS from the pulpit, few churches are willing to go as far as this one in Nashville, Tennessee.
Rev. EDWIN SANDERS (Pastor, Metropolitan Interdenominational Church): And we are standing in God's presence.
VALENTE: A few years ago, the Reverend Edwin Sanders decided to make AIDS prevention his congregation's main mission.
Rev. SANDERS: Truly the cure to HIV and AIDS can be found simply in behavior.
VALENTE: Sanders' church has taken the bold step of handing out free condoms, both at the church and in the impoverished neighborhood his church serves. Sanders says teaching sexual abstinence alone simply isn't working.
Rev. SANDERS: Sixty-five percent of all young people who are juniors in high school have had at least one sexual experience. Now you can sit here and believe that the 35 percent belong to Metropolitan if you want to. All right? But the fact is we do a disservice to ourselves and to our young if we're not honest about what's going on. God is saying we have to take action.
JUDY JORDAN (Parishioner, Metropolitan Interdenominational Church): My son was Eric Law Jordan. He died two days before his 30th birthday.
VALENTE: Judy Jordan, whose son died of AIDS, is a members of Sanders' church who passes out condoms in the community.
Ms. JORDAN: When we start taking on the different ministries of the Church that had to deal with AIDS, I kind of jumped on the bandwagon. We still have in the African-American community people that are afraid, people that still want to hold back and, "It's not going to happen to me." And, "Well, I don't need that service. I'm not HIV-positive."
VALENTE: In a more controversial move, Sanders' church also passes out free needles to prevent the spread of AIDS among intravenous drug users, a program Sanders refers to as "harm reduction."
NORMA COLEMAN (Parishioner, Metropolitan Interdenominational Church): My name is Norma Coleman, and I'm 50-plus. I'm disabled. I have HIV.
VALENTE: Norma Coleman is someone Sanders church helped get off drugs. She still recalls with anguish how many in her previous congregation rejected her because she was HIV-positive.
Ms. COLEMAN: It was like, "Uh!" You know, they had touched a hot stove or something. They didn't want to hug no more, you know?
VALENTE: But even some of Metropolitan's most active members question the church's decision to hand out needles.
LADY CORDER-CHAPMAN (Parishioner, Metropolitan Interdenominational Church): I'm opposed to needles because I you know, clean, dirty or otherwise because I don't think that's the answer. I think the answer has to be found in Jesus Christ. And you pray to him and he gives you strength to do anything.
VALENTE: (to Reverend Sanders): How do you walk that fine line between giving out the condoms and the needles for serious health reasons and not encouraging further risky behavior?
Rev. SANDERS: Well, we talk about our harm reduction initiatives as a bridge to treatment. Obviously you're never going to be effective at helping people to overcome the impact of addiction unless you somehow develop rapport. That can be that I simply meet you on the street and talk about sharing with you some tools that might help you to be safer and less vulnerable to sexually transmitted disease. If I can ever develop rapport with you on that level, then I might talk to you about how you begin to change your lifestyle.
Dr. BRIMAH: If they won't be abstinent, then what else works? And therefore, if condoms will reduce the risks, condoms should be included in the messages that are given out to these individuals.
VALENTE: Many pastors say it's hard enough to talk about sex in many African-American churches, let alone condoms.
Rev. LEWIS: Passing out condoms in the religious community, especially in the black, would seem to send the wrong message.
Rev. SANDERS: It's important not to just talk about these issues in the context of the educational programs or these special programs. It's important that it become a part of what happens on Sunday morning.
VALENTE: Despite growing attention from churches, HIV cases are piling up so fast in the South that help will have to come from outside the region.
Dr. BRIMAH: I want to remain optimistic that, in light of the bleak circumstances in which we find ourselves living with here in the Delta, that maybe somebody will hear our cry.
VALENTE: For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I'm Judy Valente.
ABERNETHY: Easha and the other HIV-positive women in that story are being treated under Medicaid and other government-funded programs. The outside help Dr. Brimah wants is to combat such contributors to the problem as poverty, hopelessness and misinformation.
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BOB ABERNETHY: In Israel, government officials have halted construction of a controversial mosque in Nazareth. The mosque was to have been built near the Church of the Annunciation, where tradition says Mary learned she would give birth to Jesus. Muslims believe the area contains the gravesite of an important Muslim leader and have protested and worshipped there. But Christian leaders, including the Pope, say building a mosque so close to the church is disrespectful. The Israeli government says it's studying the situation.
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BOB ABERNETHY: In Indonesia, new efforts to stop spiraling religious violence. In the eastern Sulawesi region following the bombing of four churches last week, police distributed copies of last month's peace pact between Christians and Muslims. And members of both churches turned over thousands of weapons, from firearms to spears to bows and arrows. Residents cheered as the weapons were destroyed.
In the past two years more than a thousand people in the area have been killed in the ongoing conflicts.
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BOB ABERNETHY: Now a special report from central Asia where militant Muslim fundamentalists, like the defeated Taliban, still want to seize power and impose strict Islamic rule on Muslims who are more moderate. Our case in point is Uzbekistan. The U.S. needs bases there to fight terrorism in Afghanistan next door. But that requires an alliance with a repressive regime whose human rights and economic policies may be spawning the very terrorism we oppose. Fred de Sam Lazaro reports from Tashkent.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Uzbekistan's monuments and public buildings show its past as a Soviet Republic. It's now independent, but former Communist boss Islam Karimov still holds a tight reign over this remote central Asian country. What has changed since the early '90s is the practice of Islam, flourishing once again as it did before the Soviet era. Eighty percent of the nation's 24 million people belong to Uzbekistan's relatively liberal Islamic tradition.
Those traditions were challenged soon after independence with the advent of Muslim missionaries from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and other nations. Shoazim Minavarov is with the government agency that regulates religious activity.
SHOAZIM MINAVAROV (Deputy Religion Minister): Uzbek people have always looked at Islam as peaceful. And it was with great trust that we accepted the foreign religious missionaries in our mosques. But what happened was that these missionaries brought a different brand of Islam which was alien, foreign to our people.
DE SAM LAZARO: The newcomers preached conservative ideas, stirring conflict and often violence, particularly in rural areas, according to Marat Zakhidov, a former member of parliament, now a human rights advocate.
MARAT ZAKHIDOV (Human Rights Advocate): People who were not willing to observe certain rules and rituals were boycotted. We saw the first manifestation of this extremism in 1997. I'm talking about assassinations of police and government officials, of businessmen in Namangan and other places.
DE SAM LAZARO: But Zakhidov says the government used the unrest as the pretext for widespread arrests of suspected Muslim fundamentalists and anyone else considered a government opponent.
A 1999 U.S. State Department report called Uzbekistan one of the world's most oppressive nations. The government of Islam Karimov has jailed thousands of citizens, ostensibly in a crackdown on terrorist activities. But the report said many of those jailed were hauled in on trumped-up weapons and narcotics charges. Many were guilty of little more than attending services in a mosque.
Marat Zakhidov himself was fired from his job as a university professor and removed from parliament. With international support he's managed to continue advocating for some of the 5500 people he says are now detained. Many are tortured to extract confessions on vague charges of extremism.
Mr. ZAKHIDOV: These are the appeals I've had in just the last two weeks. The courts are totally corrupt. It's virtually impossible to work with them. They make very unjust, and sometimes even monstrous decisions, about the fate of people.
DE SAM LAZARO: The government defends its response, citing threats from an ill-defined network of terrorist organizations and an assassination attempt on the president in 1998.
Mr. MINAVAROV: There were cases where people, based on fundamentalist feelings, were calling for the overthrow of the government, distributing leaflets, instances of violence in Ferghana. So these people have been justly prosecuted.
DE SAM LAZARO: As for re-Islamization in Uzbekistan, he said it will be according to Uzbek tradition.
Abdukayam Azimov cites eminent Islamic scholars from history who hail from this region. He heads the government-run institute which trains clerics for what he calls the moderate Hanafi brand of Islam.
ABDUKAYAM AZIMOV (Imam, Al-Biukhari Islamic Institute): We do not need to be preached to about Islam. We're the inheritors of these great scholars. Hanafism is a harmonizing Islam. It takes into account local customs. Women don't cover their faces, for example. It's more tolerant.
DE SAM LAZARO: However to some this is not authentic Islam. Muktabar Ahmedova openly supports the creation of an Islamic republic of Uzbekistan, a position that for most Uzbeks would be grounds for treason. Ahmedova's sex and age have apparently been grounds for leniency.
MUKTABAR AHMEDOVA: The Islam practiced here has been "Russified." It's been subjected to decades of atheist influences. If these people were not in power, we would, in fact, have a much purer form of Islam.
DE SAM LAZARO: Polls show a large majority of Uzbeks prefer a secular nation. Still, fundamentalist groups hold some appeal. Despite oil and mineral wealth and fertile soil, the economy has faltered badly, leaving many people worse off than they were in Soviet times, according to Ravil Bukharaev. He's an Islam scholar now at the BBC's Russian radio service.
RAVIL BUKHARAEV (Islam Scholar, BBC Russian Radio Service): These radical views, they're flourishing and flowering in a time of troubles, so-called gray areas of history when nobody understands nothing except that they had something and now they're destitute.
DE SAM LAZARO: Economically, of course.
Mr. BUKHARAEV: Economically, of course. Socially, they had some social security. Now they have none. And they turn to God because there is nothing to turn to. So where people have no hope for the future, and especially where the government is corrupt to a certain extent, more or less, then these people are very active, and they present a political force.
DE SAM LAZARO: Up and down Uzbekistan's rugged highways there are military and police checkpoints. They're off limits to cameras, but its here that traders, and especially farmers, complain they're forced to pay bribes to get through. And that further erodes their already minimal income.
Mr. ZAKHIDOV: Children are forced to help their parents to survive, to get work wherever they can rather than go to school. And the level of training of teachers has also diminished considerably.
DE SAM LAZARO: As rural literacy declines, a small urban elite flourishes. Sergei Yechkov is one of few journalists who've reported on the widespread corruption.
SERGEI YECHKOV (Journalist): It becomes bad manners if you've not paid a bribe. It has become an inalienable national characteristic of Uzbekistan. It explains the very limited amount of investment and the difficulties in relations of Uzbekistan with other countries.
DE SAM LAZARO: But this country's proximity to Afghanistan has made it a key American ally. And some human rights activists fear that this will prompt Washington to back off earlier criticism of the regime's human rights record, corruption, and the resulting economic decay, the very conditions that they say spawn Islamic fundamentalists movements and sometimes terrorism. For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in Tashkent.
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BOB ABERNETHY: Here at home, the Reverend W.A. Criswell, a long-time leader in the Southern Baptist Convention, died this week after a battle with colon cancer. He was 92. Criswell was a key force in the 1970s conservative take-over of the SBC, the largest U.S. Protestant denomination. For more than 50 years, Criswell was pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, which has more than 10,000 members.
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BOB ABERNETHY: And finally, the Ivy League schools such as Dartmouth were once considered bastions of White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestantism. But now student bodies are diverse, and universities face new issues, such as how to accommodate religious dietary requirements. Observant Jews keep kosher, while Muslims eat food called "halal" or "lawful." Many Hindus follow a strict vegetarian diet called "sakahara."
This week Dartmouth College unveiled the Pavilion, a new dining hall to honor all those traditions. Kim Lawton reports.
KIM LAWTON: In an increasingly pluralistic society, serving a religiously sensitive dinner can be a complex endeavor.
DAVID NEWLOVE: (Dartmouth Dining Services): So what we try to do is accommodate everybody's laws and make sure that we don't have any possibility of contaminating somebody else's food, to be respectful of their wishes.
LAWTON: That means having four separate kitchens, three sets of cooking implements and two dishwashing rooms. To avoid confusion and contamination, the staff has an elaborate color coding system for everything from chopping knives to serving trays. Since kosher rules prohibit preparing and serving meat and dairy foods together, one of the kitchens is literally locked while another is in use.
Mr. NEWLOVE: So what we do is, anything that's dairy, we either lock it up or cover it when it's a meat meal.
LAWTON: Many Muslims will eat kosher food when halal is not available. Under both rules, eating pork is forbidden. But halal requirements differ from kosher on several points. For example, while it's not necessary to separate meat and dairy under halal, alcohol products such as vanilla extract are forbidden. Also, the Jewish and Muslim practices differ for slaughtering animals.
Unidentified Man #1: (Indicating pans of food) The wild rice is sakahara, and sakahara stir-fry, and sakahara and sakahara.
LAWTON: The sakahara, or Hindu vegetarian component of the Pavilion came along later in the planning process. Although vegetables are served in all of the kitchens, in the Hindu stations they're carefully separated -- again, by color coding -- so they don't come into contact with any meat or dairy products. The Pavilion is the culmination of years of planning and collaboration by Muslim and Jewish students and faculty. Now the different groups break bread together in a dining hall.
JASON SPITALNICK (Jewish Student): We came here yesterday. There were Muslims and Jews sitting down for lunch together. And I expect that to happen quite a bit.
LAWTON: The students hope that sharing meals every day will be a bridge between communities that are often in conflict in the rest of the world.
YOUSEF HAQUE (Muslim Student): It will change the way the relationships -- and cultivate kind of more support between the communities and encourage dialogue.
LAWTON: Any student at Dartmouth can eat at the Pavilion. It's on the regular campus meal plan. It's also the only public kosher restaurant in the state of New Hampshire. I'm Kim Lawton reporting.
ABERNETHY: Bon appetite.
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BOB ABERNETHY: That's our program for now. I'm Bob Abernethy. To find out more about RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, logon to pbs.org or America Online, keyword: PBS.
As we leave you this week, the congregation at Locus Grove Missionary Baptist Church in Greenwood, Mississippi.
 Back to Article Finder: Stories by Week
© 2001 Educational Broadcasting Corporation. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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