Lives can be saved when you preach love

This article was published in The Sydney Morning Herald 23 March 2010

In many countries, despite the knowledge science now affords us about human sexuality, irrational hatred of sexual minorities is encouraged - even promoted - by religious leaders, in supposed reliance upon their understandings of religious texts. They rely on their imperfect human understanding of what was written in ancient books long before Alfred Kinsey demonstrated the realities of human sexual experience.

Most religious people are good and kind. I honour those in all religions who are struggling to make a charitable, informed and unbiased contribution to the global struggle against HIV/AIDS. However, officially the Catholic and Greek and Orthodox Christian churches are still in serious denial about the evidence - just as they originally denied the opinions of Galileo and Copernicus that the Earth circled the sun.