Blood bank discrimination

Allison Tyra’s article about blood banks refusing to accept blood from gay men is misleading and nothing short of propaganda. You would never guess it from Ms. Tyra’s article, but blood banks regularly and systematically discriminate against a whole host of high-risk donors, not just men who have sex with men.

For example, people who have traveled to countries with high rates of malaria infection are subject to discrimination; Africans are subject to discrimination; hemophiliacs are, too; anyone who has lived in parts of Great Britain or Europe for a certain period of time; anyone who has spent more than 72 hours behind bars; prostitutes; men who have sex with prostitutes; people who recreationally use intravenous drugs; and anyone with a family history of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

Blood centers aren’t showing a latent “homophobia,” or “Europhobia,” or “prostitute-ophobia” by discriminating against these people; they are doing their due diligence to prevent the transmission of diseases – most of them untreatable and/or incurable – known or thought to be spread by blood.

The man interviewed in Miss Tyra’s article, “Andy,” has recklessly endangered the lives of strangers – and them in medical need – by his own sexual behavior, and by deliberately lying to the blood donation center to circumvent the safety measures they’ve put in place.

And to what end? To the ignoble end of normalizing and removing the social stigma of sodomy.

“Andy” would risk homicide to strangers because he doesn’t want any gay man to get his feelings hurt at the blood center.

He is free to think himself an oppressed martyr to the homosexual cause, but it is the proper duty of the blood centers to ensure that he and other deluded “victims” do not make unwilling martyrs of the patients who would receive their potentially diseased blood.

Abram Hess
2007 IU alumnus