This is a step up from the previous Food and Drug Administration blanket ban on donating at all, and it would "put the U.S. in line with other countries including Australia, Japan and the U.K.," but it's still controversial: "Activists, however, questioned whether requiring a year of celibacy from gay men in order to donate blood amounted to a significant policy shift."
One such activist is Slate columnist Mark Joseph Stern, who wrote:
This is, no doubt, a step forward. But it's a very small one. The one-year deferral policy is still rooted in an outdated, insulting vision of gay men as diseased, promiscuous lechers. A gay man in a decades-long monogamous relationship with his husband will be forbidden from donating blood. So, too, will any gay or bisexual man who consistently practices safe sex. Meanwhile, straight people who routinely have sex with multiple opposite-sex partners — or not they use condoms —face no deferral at all.
It's utterly illogical to forbid a monogamous gay man from donating while permitting promiscuous straight people to give as much blood as they want. But as we've learned over the last 31 years, there's very little reason behind the FDA's gay-related policies. The American Red Cross, America's Blood Centers, the American Association of Blood Banks, and the American Medical Association have all moved on and now support scrapping the ban altogether.
Perhaps in another 31 years, we'll see the FDA move to a sensible, nondiscriminatory rule. For now, we're stuck with this embarrassing, unscientific half-measure.
