Gay rights activists and their allies in Congress (not to mention common sense and decency) were dealt a terrible blow on Friday when HHS’s Advisory Committee on Blood Safety and Availability voted 9-6 to retain an outdated, discriminatory, shameful ban on gay male blood donors who have had sex since 1977. While the committee also voted unanimously that the policy is “suboptimal” and made the recommendation that distinctions should be made between low- and high-risk gay donors, nine members of the committee still voted, seemingly without any logical reason, to keep the draconian lifetime ban on gay men in place.
It is difficult to see how anything but homophobia motivated the decision to uphold the ban by these nine members of the HHS panel. At a time when blood shortages are all too common and surgeries can literally be put on hold because of a lack of blood, this policy is not only discriminatory – it’s impractical and dangerous. And it flies in the face of common sense. The ban, as I’m sure most people know, was put in place at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis in 1985. We know a lot more about HIV/AIDS now, and our testing has greatly improved; according to a report by Gay Men’s Health Crisis, considering today’s testing capabilities, the chances of a unit of HIV-positive blood making it to the blood supply are about 1 in 1.5 million. And not only is the ban on gay male blood donors discriminatory, impractical, and irrational – it’s also glaringly inconsistent, considering that gay men in a monogamous relationship are banned for life from giving blood while a man who has had heterosexual sex with a prostitute must wait only one year before giving blood. Aside from the pseudo-science that occasionally spurts from homophobic bigots who attempt to justify this injustice, there appears to be no good reason to retain this outdated blood ban.
The American Red Cross, represented on this issue by director of biomedical communication Stephanie Millian, agrees:
While the Red Cross is obligated by law to follow the guidelines set forth by the FDA, we also strongly support the use of rational, scientifically based deferral periods that are applied fairly and consistently among donors who engage in similar risk activities.
So does the American Association of Blood Banks and America’s Blood Centers.
Yet the lifetime ban on gay blood donors remains. The HHS panel’s decision to keep the ban in place doesn’t just bar sexually active gay men from donating blood. The deeper effect of the ban’s retention is that gay men (and the LGBT community in general, even though this specific policy applies solely to gay men) will continue to be stigmatized and seen as something other than normal, something dangerous to fear. This discriminatory policy, along with DADT and DOMA and many other anti-gay laws on the books across the country, only serves to feed homophobia and bigotry. It’s not about keeping people healthy, it’s not about science – it’s about ignoring the consensus of those who know what they’re talking about and keeping a failed, shameful policy in place anyway, at the expense of the LGBT community.
Friday's decision is not just irrational, unfounded, and wrong - it's outrageous. This may not seem like a universal issue that affects everyone, but it is. It boils down to what kind of a society we want to foster and live in. It boils down to letting science, not Religious Right talking points and anti-gay bigotry, determine FDA policy decisions. It’s about what’s right, fair, and moral.
This battle has been lost for now, but we must keep the pressure on...until they can’t ignore us anymore.