Gays, Please Keep Your Sperm to Yourselves

Okay, we’ve seriously hit a new low. You thought it couldn’t get any lower? Wrong.

The Food and Drug Administration is about to implement new rules recommending that any man who has engaged in homosexual sex in the previous five years be barred from serving as an anonymous sperm donor.

The FDA has rejected calls to scrap the provision, insisting that gay men collectively pose a higher-than-average risk of carrying the AIDS virus. Critics accuse the FDA of stigmatizing all gay men rather than adopting a screening process that focuses on high-risk sexual behavior by any would-be donor, gay or straight.

"Under these rules, a heterosexual man who had unprotected sex with HIV-positive prostitutes would be OK as a donor one year later, but a gay man in a monogamous, safe-sex relationship is not OK unless he's been celibate for five years," said Leland Traiman, director of a clinic in Alameda, Calif., that seeks gay sperm donors.

[…]

But it is the provision's symbolic aspect that particularly troubles gay-rights groups. Kevin Cathcart, executive director of Lambda Legal, has called it "policy based on bigotry."

"The part I find most offensive — and a little frightening — is that it isn't based on good science," Cathcart said. "There's a steadily increasing trend of heterosexual transmission of HIV, and yet the FDA still has this notion that you protect people by putting gay men out of the pool."

First of all, if I were to go to a sperm bank, I would assume that all the possible donors’ sperm would have been thoroughly screened, so shouldn’t this be a moot point? There is absolutely no reason for this aside from flat-out bigotry. Something tells me that this has far less to do with HIV than the idea of a “gay gene” being passed on to another generation, for which there is no screening, but a wide acceptance of the theory that homosexuality is genetic. What better way to stop the transmission of a possible gay gene than to ban gay donors at sperm banks?

For all the lip service that the Dominionists give to their alleged belief that homosexuality is a choice, somewhere deep down they know it is not a choice, not for everyone. And that’s what’s driving this policy—an attempt to keep homosexuality out of the gene pool as much as possible. They don’t want gays having kids, even if it’s by way of sperm donation.

I don’t care if they argue HIV from now to eternity; this is about quarantining gays and trying to keep them out of the general population. It’s complete bullshit, and hiding behind some crapass argument about HIV is truly pathetic, especially considering that for a very, very long time anyone of any sexual orientation has been playing roulette with his or her life if they go around having unprotected, anonymous sex. It hasn’t been called the Gay Cancer since Reagan was around (and doing his best to ignore it), and that’s because we’re all at risk. Surely the FDA is well aware of the statistics on the risks among all people, which makes this obvious as the red herring that it is.

Fucking cunts.

And let me just say once again that it doesn’t really matter if being gay is predestined by one’s genes or is the result of a difficult choice or is the consequence of a choice that’s as easy as whether to eat a plate of spaghetti or a plate of shit. I don’t care why you’re gay, because it doesn’t make any fucking difference. Being gay doesn’t infringe on anyone else’s rights and so no one needs to worry their bigoted little heads about it. Go mind your own goddamned business and leave people who aren’t trying to tell you whom to fuck or whom to love or whom to marry the hell alone so they can have the same freedom that you have.

(Hat tip Pam.)