Gay Men Want to Taint the Nation's Blood Supply...Again

By Alan Caruba

In 1993, tennis champion Arthur Ashe died as the result of receiving a blood transfusion that was tainted with the AIDS virus. Ashe was not homosexual, but the donor of the blood was.

Earlier, in 1985 as the AIDS epidemic began decimating large numbers of homosexuals, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) instituted a rule that homosexual men could not be blood donors.

Guess what? The nation’s homosexuals want to have that ban removed in much the same way they have successfully lobbied to get some States to accept same-sex marriage.

Supporting the effort to taint the nation’s blood supply are Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) and Rep. Mike Quigley (D-IL). Working with them is the Obama administration’s Health and Human Services Secretary, Kathleen Sebelius.

It gets worse. Even the Red Cross is on record for lifting the ban. Until such time as the Red Cross makes it clear that it will uphold and enforce the ban, financial donations should be withheld.

When your life hangs in the balance, do you really want to receive blood that may, in turn, infect you with AIDS?

Do you believe the ban should be lifted because it represents an issue of “discrimination” or “fairness”? That’s what homosexual activist groups are claiming and, frankly, in matters of life and death, I want the FDA to discriminate in favor of protecting life.

A recent article in the National Journal put the issue in perspective: “Men who have sex with other men, including gay and bisexual men, have an HIV infection rate 60 times higher than that of the general population, the FDA says.”

“They have an infection rate 800 times higher than first-time donors and 8,000 times higher than the rate of repeat blood donors. Tests cannot pick up a new HIV infection in the blood with 100 percent accuracy; because blood is often pooled, many people may be at risk from a single infected donor.”

According to the Red Cross estimates, every two seconds someone in the U.S. needs blood and more than 38,000 blood donations are needed every day. One out of every ten people admitted to a hospital needs blood.

I don’t want to live in an America where the need for a blood transfusion puts anyone at risk for AIDS.

I want to understand why, in the midst of the worst financial crisis in a decade, the U.S. government gave a grant of a million dollars for a study of “The Association between Penis Size and Sexual Health among Men Who Have Sex with Men.” The study ran for five years and was subsidized by the National Institute of Health.

Previously I have written that the Obama administration is the most gay-friendly in the nation’s history, but tainting the nation’s blood supply by lifting the ban on homosexual men as donors defies sanity.

It is rapidly becoming evident that the election of Barack Obama has ushered in a period of fiscal insanity, but I shudder to think that this nation might have elected Sen. John Kerry president in 2004. Along with Rep. Quigley he has been pushing HHS to end “the outdated, discriminatory lifetime ban on gay and bisexual men from donating blood.”

This is way beyond stupid. It is negligence and pandering on a scale that will literally put people’s lives at risk.

I don’t care if gays are offended by the ban.

I don’t want men marrying men or women marrying women.

I don’t want children to be indoctrinated in the nation’s schools to believe that there is anything “normal” about homosexuality.

I don’t care if gays are offended by this expression of my opinion. You’re not “special”, you’re just gay.

This is about life and death in America, not sexual preferences.

© Alan Caruba, 2011