Back in the early 1980’s, the wonderous Reagan Administration, and society as a whole, did a bang up job in reacting to the AIDS outbreak. One of the reactionary responses was to prohibit gay men who had sex after 1977 from donating blood. Would it shock you to learn that that ban remains alive and well today, in the 21st century?

Not a single piece of scientific evidence supports the ban,” said Sen. John Kerry, a Democrat, who joined 16 other Democrats and independent Sen. Bernie Sanders in writing Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Margaret Hamburg. The lawmakers stressed that the science has changed dramatically since the ban was established in 1983 at the advent of the HIV-AIDS crisis. Today donated blood must undergo two different, highly accurate tests that make the risk of tainted blood entering the blood supply virtually zero, they said. The senators said that while hospitals and emergency rooms are in urgent need of blood products, “healthy blood donors are turned away every day due to an antiquated policy and our blood supply is not necessarily any safer for it.” Brian Moulton, chief legislative counsel for the Human Rights Campaign,the nation’s largest gay rights group, said they are hopeful that the policy, last reviewed in 2006, will change under President Barack Obama, “who is interested in looking at all the policies that have a discriminatory effect.” The goal, he said, is “to have policies in place that are based on the science” rather than “any discriminatory idea about our community.”

So, wait a minute. What the FUCK! It would be one thing if this policy had not been reviewed since its enactment since 1983, although I would wonder why the Clinton Administration did not review it, since we knew in the 1990’s how to test for HIV. But the policy was reviewed in 2006 during the Bush Administration, and those sick fucks decided to keep the ban in place!!??!!

Republicans and conservatives in general really need to get over their homophobia already.