When the hearts that beat inside us are weighed and valued, treated like any other consumer good, do our characteristics make them less priceless? If I were a supermodel or a rocket scientist, wouldn’t it still be the same red pump filling me with oxygen regardless of my social status or race or any other skin-deep difference?
Some hearts, however, are apparently worth more than others. Political administrations, scared by
their own flickering shadows, let innocents die because of twisted, stereotypical assumptions.
One of the most harmful U.S. policies toward homosexuals is the U.S. Federal Drug Administration’s ban on homosexuals donating blood and organs. There is a shortage of blood, especially of rare types and universal donors. Anyone who doubts there is a need should glance at the mile-long lists of people who will lose their friends and families to genetic flaws. These flaws could be fixed if we opened the doors to all people willing to give parts of themselves in
compassion and mercy.
What does it matter if the person who gives that gift is homosexual?
There is the obvious and cliché response of AIDS protection. The blood ban was placed in the United States around 1977, when HIV was spreading through the homosexual (as well as heterosexual) community like wildfire and there was a notable
danger of contamination.
Today that threat has lessened, and the bans on homosexual blood donors are already ridiculous in nature. One homosexual act, no matter what kind (and the blood donor form is quite vague), disqualifies someone from being a donor. It doesn’t matter if you dabbled, if you did it thirty years ago, if you were monogamous, if you were safe. The mere fact that you are who you are makes you different.
Furthermore, non-homosexuals, often less safe as blood donors, are not placed under the same brutal microscope. Prostitutes, promiscuous heterosexuals and intravenous drug users are only deferred from donating, not banned, despite the fact that their lifestyle choices may be more threatening to public peace and lives.
The ironic twist is that the myth that homosexuals are the main carriers of AIDS has persisted in the face of truth. Only about 8 percent of the U.S. male gay population is HIV positive. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that the infection rate for heterosexual females has increased by the highest degree, making heterosexual females the largest threat group.
Even if there are more gay people with AIDS than straight people with AIDS, a disputed fact on its own, the Red Cross and other organizations sift blood through at least three different sensitive screening tests. An HIV-infected specimen will slip through only once in 1.2 million times. The Red Cross doesn’t ask about homosexual behavior in other nations. Belgium and parts of Spain take all organs and blood donated, yet their rates of AIDS infection have not skyrocketed. The Dutch and the Swiss are also reconsidering their policies of banning homosexual donations.
The Hemophilia Foundation
opposes the ban, saying that if people who had homosexual sex are allowed to give blood after a five-year deferment, an estimated 62,300 donors would be added to the list of eligible candidates. Lifting the policy, in their words, is “crucial to the donor pool.”
If each blood donation could save three people, as we are told when we line up for the shot and the cookies, then another estimated 186,900 lives could be saved if the policy against homosexual donors were altered. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to tell you that those lives saved outweigh the one-in-a-million chance of getting fatally sick.
My father’s recent health problems have made this prohibition even more ludicrous in my eyes. If a short-sighted, discriminatory and dehumanizing policy is the only thing that separates his life from his death, I would spend the rest of my life in pain, wondering “what if?” What if there had been a donor out there with a good heart who was denied the chance to give blood because his personal life made the Reagan administration and every administration since a little uncomfortable?
The question is: Is it ethical to lie about your sexuality on the donor forms if you know you don’t have AIDS, circumventing the tools of the tormentors to give a life-saving gift anyway? The point is, no one should have to. No one should be forced into a closet just to be kind.
If nothing else, the ban perpetuates the myth that homosexuals are somehow sick and should be kept separated — an apartheid of organs. Maybe it’s time to stop thinking with our Bibles and start thinking with our hearts.
Let all hearts be created equal, and let them beat strongly.

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