Posted on 12/24/2006 7:08:11 PM PST by SmithL
Santa Cruz, Calif. -- A gay student prevented from donating blood because of his sexual history has stirred debate among Santa Cruz school officials over whether to continue hosting campus blood drives.
Ronnie Childers, 17, student body president at Harbor High School, said he volunteered at a blood drive at his school earlier this month for five hours and waited in line for three more before being turned away.
"I was turned away because of my sexual contacts," Childers said. "The reasoning behind me not being able to give blood is ridiculous. ... It made me feel like an outcast."
According to U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulations, a man who has had a sexual encounter with another man since 1977 is ineligible to donate.
Santa Cruz city schools officials said they were reconsidering whether to have blood drives on campus if students were required to divulge information about their sexual activities.
"As the blood supply has become so politicized over time we need to check our policies,"
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Political Correctness kills!
Perfectly legitimate rule. They do not need to "rethink" this restriction.
Just once I want to hear one gay person stand and say "We won't give so others may".
I don't even care if they agree but the politics of the whole thing is going to prevent people from giving that which is needed.
Well now, we don't want to hurt little Ronnies feelings, now do we?
Let's go ahead and gamble with some innocent persons life, when it hinges on recieving a blood donation by someone who may kill them from within
How sad that this guy is willing to risk other people's lives because of his sexual proclivities.
susie
Thank God someone still had the gonads to turn the little walking death squad away before his contaminated blood could kill others. I have zero sympathy for his feelings.
If he has made the calculation that his life span should be around 40 years, that does not mean that someone waiting for life saving blood has the same calculator.
The reasoning is not ridiculous. But since this is about poor little gay boy's "feelings," we must change the policies to accomodate him forthwith!
This is a standard AIDS prevention precaution. The vicious little queer and the vile PC schoolboard may have just killed a few people who needed some safe blood. These people are pure evil masquarading as sweetness and light.
We don't need no stinkin school to hold blood drives. Plenty of charitable organizations that are willing to hold them even if the gays are rightly banned from giving. We don't need poison in blood transfusions. Let the gays hold their own blood drives, if they can find anyone to take their blood.
In the early 1980s blood became a vector for HIV infection and transmitted a fatal illness to more than half of the 16,000 hemophiliacs in the United States and over 12,000 blood transfusion recipients (CDC, MMWR; July 1993).
http://www.nap.edu/execsumm_pdf/4989.pdf
No, Ronnie .. let's forget the evil of it .. it's damned dangerous !
And you're an @$$hole to think .... um .... never mind.
No it's not, Ronnie.
Such IGNORANCE still to this day is hard for me to understand.
I was wondering myself about the propriety of holding a blood drive in a public high school. Surely these are, by law if not in fact, minor children, and such a medical procedure would be subject to parential approval and oversight?
I haven't given in years because of my past.
Let me be honest and frank. Yes I did eat hamburgers and other local meats while in Germany during 1990-1992. Due to mad cow, I can't give blood since I ate meat on the local economy. I haven't tried to give blood since 1997.
The kid doesn't realize he could have AIDS or other sexual diseases. It's not like a potential partner would lie about having a disease.
The Red Cross has to protect the blood supply. How quickly everone forgets the 80s when lots of people got AIDS through blood transfustions. I remember Arthur Ashe got AIDs this way and died too young.
What's bizarre, I don't expect that Red Cross or anyone else wants blood donated by anyone that's promiscuous, no matter what their preferences are. How do you suppose the gay haitian intravenous drug users "feel"?
Yep, you said it.
But of course all the students in high school today have absolutely no memory of how serious that problem was. They were born after AZT was in clinical trials. They have no knowledge of how terrible AIDS was prior to the introduction of drugs to control the symptoms. To students in high school today it is just an abstract issue about personal rights but without any connection to responsibilites.
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