Joe Biden & LGBT Agenda: End of Tolerance | National Review

One of the highlighted sections in the Biden proposal is the former vice president’s pledge to ensure that “the discriminatory lifetime ban on blood donation” for gay men — a ban he claims is “based on stigma” — remains lifted, and promises to implement “regulations [that] are based on science.” The Obama administration first moved to lift the lifetime ban on homosexual blood donation in 2015, and the Trump administration loosened regulations even further, recently dispensing with guidelines that required men to abstain from homosexual sex for at least one year in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Biden never engages with the facts that begot the ban in the first place, namely, that gay men, despite comprising roughly two percent of the American population, make up nearly 70 percent of the national HIV caseload. Since post-donation blood tests occasionally fail to detect the presence of HIV, disqualifying would-be donors who have engaged in homosexual sex was a prudential measure designed to protect the recipients of donated blood.

Even if one were to concede that the ban was “stigmatizing,” it is not at all clear that we should value the feelings of potential blood donors over the health and safety of those receiving blood transfusions. Perhaps an argument can be made that the risk is “worth it” — there is a need for blood donations, and maybe narrower restrictions would expand the pool of donors — but there is a tradeoff involved. If Joe Biden — whose proposal makes no mention of this tradeoff — thinks that “equality” demands jeopardizing the health of patients who require blood transfusions to shield donors from the “stigmatizing” reality of their disproportionate rates of HIV, he should say so outright, so the public can debate the consequences involved in pursuing the “equality” towards which we are apparently bound to “march.”

Biden also promises to “decriminalize HIV exposure and transmission,” because such laws — all together, now! — “perpetuate discrimination and stigma towards people with HIV/AIDS.” Perhaps there is a reasonable case to be made that some anti-exposure laws are unduly punitive (some states punish HIV-positive persons who spit in public, for instance, yet spitting poses no threat of viral transmission). But those who could be unwittingly exposed to HIV might prefer keeping “discrimination and stigma” against deliberate exposure in place. Again, if Joe Biden thinks these concerns are irrational or bigoted, he should say so.

Source: Joe Biden & LGBT Agenda: End of Tolerance | National Review