yes. Generally they are. But what does it say when other nations, just as PC as the US have stated that they will NOT remove the ban. And not for reasons of discrimination but for reasons of the public health and the necessity of a clean blood supply.

I see strains of similarities in this matter and the matter of the two lesbians at Dollywood. Dollywood is christian for all practical purposes.

you're going to end up with homo blood in your blood supply so you might as well get over it now. Hell, it's most likely already there. The blood supply doesn't need to be protected from homos. It needs to be protected from infections. /shrug

I am not even going to indulge this stupid conversation with you people anymore. Calypso is an ignorant beast and I would like to continue to respect you so I'm done with it.

But I am going to leave you two with this: when I got infected with HIV, it wasn't by a homo. It was by a white, heterosexual female junkie who left her broken hardware laying in a Ralph's bag by the pier in Santa Cruz. Her filthy needle went through the skin between my big and next toe and the plastic syringe broke and cut my foot just under the ball of it. Further blame can be laid on the heterosexual Indian (dot, not feather Indian) doctor who didn't think to immediately start me on PReP treatments to avoid infection as is the standard procedure, which I found out after the fact. All he bothered to do was give me a tetanus shot and tell me good luck.

Being that I was in great health, better than the average 30-something, it took over a year for it to show up on an eliza test. The hepatitis B showed up in only five months. I was lucky and fought it off so it didn't go chronic and now it's as if I had been vaccinated for it. Never even had to be treated for it. However, a year after the incident in Santa Cruz, I showed all 6 protein bands positive with a wild type HIV strain. Counting the bands back, you could tell about when the infection occurred. Thankfully, the filthy junkie bitch wasn't getting treatment so there was no drug resistance already present. Additionally, because I stay in such good shape, the viral load was barely above 10k when they would have expected it to be well over 150K by that point. My CD4 count was still in normal range, sitting around 725. Now, six months after beginning treatment, which consists of a single pill at bedtime every day, my viral count is completely undetectable and my CD4 has never dipped below 700. I haven't been sick once and there's no expectation that I will get sick. In fact, my life expectancy today is figured around 74 years old. Not gonna get to live to be 100 like I wanted but...oh well. Seventy four isn't too shabby and I get to check out before I get too old to take care of myself.

There are blessings in all this. It could have been one of the two little girls about 15 yards away that ran over the junkie's bag of goodies. That would have been real swell having a 7 or 8 year old little girl having to deal with it. Or it could have been the teenage couple walking along the beach earlier...wouldn't that have been a great first date story? Or it could have been the little girls' mom. Instead, it was me...someone who was better positioned to deal with it financially and physically.

But yeah, you can sit there and rant about homos being the source of all disease and being the culprits but I can tell you from experience that infection doesn't see sexuality. Infection doesn't care what your morals are or what prejudices you hold. If it finds a way in, it's in and like I said before, all it takes is a chance misplacement of your foot on the wrong patch of sand.

So do with that anecdote what you will. I'm done trying to help people who don't want to be helped. I'm done offering perspective to people who can't perceive anything beyond the tips of their noses...because they like it that way. Who am I to rob someone of the comfort of their self imposed delusions?

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The voice in your head that says "you can't do this" is a LIAR!!!

Somehow. You seem to be angry at me for your situation. If you perceive that i am protecting the blood supply from homosexuals so be it. I want a healthy blood supply for every US citizen. If that means keeping those most likely to carry the infection out of the loop. So be it. Others are excluded too but i don't hear you encouraging their bans being lifted.

I'm not angry at you for my situation. You disgust me on every concievable level because you are an oderous twit bereft of anything resembling morality or reason. Every time you flap your jowls, the world is brought down just a little more by the spewing of the offal of your rotted heart.

People like you are deserving of nothing more than scorn and derision. When you finally bless the world with your death, the only pity I'll be able to show is for the poor maggots of the earth who will then be forced to share the ground with your cursed carcass.

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The voice in your head that says "you can't do this" is a LIAR!!!

Alrighty then.

It seems to me that the rumblings for removal of the ban come up at least yearly and in some cases every six months as you can see from this pieced dated 2007 or 08. This lightly addresses the accuracy of the tests.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/...n2842953.shtml

Before giving blood, all men are asked if they have had sex, even once, with another man since 1977. Those who say they have are permanently banned from donating. The FDA said those men are at increased risk of infection by HIV that can be transmitted to others by blood transfusion.

In March 2006, the Red Cross, the international blood association AABB and America's Blood Centers proposed replacing the lifetime ban with a one-year deferral following male-to-male sexual contact. New and improved tests, which can detect HIV-positive donors within just 10 to 21 days of infection, make the lifetime ban unnecessary, the blood groups told the FDA.

In a document posted Wednesday, the FDA said it would change its policy if given data that show doing so wouldn't pose a "significant and preventable" risk to blood recipients.

"It is a way of saying, 'Whatever was presented to us was not sufficient to make us change our minds,'" Bianco said.

The FDA said HIV tests currently in use are highly accurate, but still cannot detect the virus 100 percent of the time. The estimated HIV risk from a unit of blood is currently about one per 2 million in the United States, according to the agency.

Critics of the exclusionary policy said it bars potential healthy donors, despite the increasing need for donated blood, and discriminates against gays. The FDA recognized the policy defers many healthy donors but rejected the suggestion it's discriminatory.

Anyone who's used intravenous drugs or been paid for sex also is permanently barred from donating blood.

and look here, prostitutes are banned from from donating blood. Wonder when their Prostitues Rights Group is going to protest.

Only an ignorant beast would fail to draw a distinction between a gay person and a prostitute.

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The voice in your head that says "you can't do this" is a LIAR!!!

I'm a little surprised that Calypso would compare gay men with prostitutes.

I expected with her level of ignorance.......... she would try to equate them with pedophiles.

.

Don't give her any ideas. She has WND doing enough of that already.

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The voice in your head that says "you can't do this" is a LIAR!!!

I'm sure it's not a new idea to her.

I'll bet that even if she doesn't have the guts to admit it here, she truly believes that gay men prey on little boys.

That's a key part of their indoctrination of hate.


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