About time

John Kerry has called for an end to the ban on gay men donating blood. It has long been one of the most ridiculous bits of anti-gay discrimination, right up there with DADT. The original rationale may have had some merit, since AIDS was an overwhelmingly gay disease at the time and there were no methods for detecting it, but today there are more non-gay people with AIDS than gay people, and there are methods for detecting it.

Tangentially, this makes me feel better about the Red Cross. I had long heard of people boycotting the Red Cross because they refused to accept gay blood, and I had not realized that the Red Cross was forbidden by law to accept it. I'm glad to see them also pushing for this.