Meeting of the Parliament

Meeting date: Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Official Report 865KB pdf

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Time for Reflection

Good afternoon. The first item of business is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leader today is Marion Chatterley, spiritual and pastoral care co-ordinator at Waverley Care.

Today, as many of you will know, is world AIDS day and I am delighted to have been given the opportunity to share a moment of reflection with this Parliament.

HIV is now a treatable disease; we cannot cure it, but we have treatments that work, and yet people are still dying from HIV-related illness, not just in resource-poor countries where access to treatment is difficult but here in Scotland. Many of those people are actually being killed by stigma.

Let me tell you about someone whose fear of HIV-related stigma took over his life. He was a young man with a bright future ahead who had taken a sexual risk. He became so consumed by anxiety—totally convincing himself that he had contracted HIV—that he became unable to work. He lost weight, he became clinically depressed and he was in danger of losing all that he had worked hard to achieve. It took him more than a year to find the courage to take a test. His fear was not really of illness or of medical intervention, but of the way that he might be treated if he tested positive for HIV.

That man’s real fear was of the way that other people might make him feel. He thought that he would be discriminated against if he were to test positive. He truly believed that people would treat him differently and the thought of being treated differently was too much for him to manage.

There is talk at the moment within HIV organisations of how we might work with the churches to help them become HIV competent. By that, we mean not that churches should turn themselves into centres of expertise but that they should be places where people who are living with HIV feel welcomed—not more welcomed than anyone else, but welcomed as equals.

I wonder whether we should, as a community of people living in Scotland, seek to become an HIV competent society. That, for me, would be a society where people who lived with HIV were treated as equals—not singled out for special treatment, nor stigmatised because of the virus that they carry. If we were to achieve that, we might begin to come near to obeying that fundamental commandment that underpins much of Holy Scripture:

“love one another as I have loved you.”

God’s love for each one of us is unchanging and non-judgmental. If we were able to express even a hint of that love, we would go a long way towards becoming an HIV competent society.