Bad Blood

Let's say that you, spurred on by the recent tragedies of the past few years, want to give something back. You wanna help out, do something right, but you have a problem. You see, you're broke and really can't give any money to the relief funds and you're too busy to go down and volunteer, so what do you do? Well why not donate some blood? Yeah, that's something you can do. It doesn't cost you anything, you only have to give up about an hour of your day at most, and you get a cookie and some OJ for your troubles. That, and you'll know that you're helping people who truly need it... What's that? You're a gay man? Sorry, never mind.

Since 1985 the FDA has put a ban on any male donor who has had even one sexual encounter with another man since the year 1977. Though there have been several attempts to remove this ban, as far as I can read, it is still in effect. The reasoning for this is because it is seen that homosexual relations is a high risk for transmitting diseases. Basically, it's easier and more prevalent for gay men to have HIV.

Now I could blow that away as really bad science and forced statistics. I could point at the level of disease on race lines, how any man and woman who preform anal sex are just as likely, or that it's actually shared needle use that is the higher transference of blood born diseases. But I won't, cause it's not the point. You can't just lop off a litany of perfectly viable volunteers just because the odds are higher that they might be diseased compared to another according to your bad math. The FDA is in essentially saying that one group of people can participate, and another can't. That's right, they're discriminating against male homosexuals.

They're not doing it intentionally, no, they're only doing it because they're looking at the data they gathered, and came to the wrong conclusion. In 1985 when this ban was passed HIV and AIDS was new and scary. They didn't know a lot about it at the time, they didn't know many ways to prevent it, and it seemed like it was located solely in the Homosexual population. The disease was referred to as the Gay Cancer, it was wide spread, it was terrifying. In they're haste to keep this deadly disease out of the population at large, one could argue that the ban was needed.

But it's not anymore, it's just not. They argue that the tests aren't one hundred percent, that there's human error, and that it's just too much of a risk still. But it's 2010, HIV and AIDS are not the gay cancer anymore, just as many straight people suffer from the disease as well. It's no longer so very wide spread among the gay community with the increased use of protection and testing. Every gay man walking the street is not diseased, and they're blood is just as 'high risk' as the woman who last year banged three guys in one night with no condom... Right now all this bad does is discriminate, it keeps a part of the population from helping with the massive needs blood donation. If you need to live in your small minded world, test the blood more strictly, but don't disallow good blood.

You need it more than they do.