Southern Baptists Stop Giving Out AIDS Booklet

The Southern Baptist Convention has stopped distributing the surgeon general’s report on AIDS to the denomination’s 14.6 million members because the government document does not condemn all sex outside marriage.

The action was taken by the Southern Baptist’s Christian Life Commission at its first meeting after fundamentalists solidified their control of policy-making posts at last June’s annual convention of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

The commission, which serves as the ethics watchdog for Southern Baptists, also elected a new executive director, Richard Land, who pledged to place the agency “on the cutting edge of the pro-life movement,” to reverse the agency’s longstanding opposition to capital punishment and to teach young Baptists that “it is contrary to God’s will to date non-Christians.”

The ban on the report, which the commission had reprinted in a booklet, came 18 months after the commission’s previous leaders met with C. Everett Koop, the surgeon general, to discuss what could be done to slow the spread of AIDS.

A foreword to the Baptist reprint of the report contained a “warning” that it had “explicit language related to physical anatomy and human reproduction. . . . “ It added that the Baptist agency had reprinted the report “as a service to concerned Christians, not as a guide to Christian morality.”