The Food and Drug Administration will not permit you to donate blood if you have engaged in certain high risk activities associated with a greater likelihood of contracting the HIV virus.  This includes same-sex intimate relations between men. “FDA’s policies on donor deferral for history of male sex with males date back to 1983, when the risk of AIDS from transfusion was first recognized,” says the agency’s website. “A history of male-to-male sex is associated with an increased risk for the presence of and transmission of certain infectious diseases, including HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.”

Officials at San Jose State University regard this as invidious discrimination against gays.  For that reason, the University has banned blood drives at the school in protest of the F.D.A. policy since 2008, and has announced that the ban will continue. The school’s logic is simple, or perhaps simple-minded. Banning men who have sex with men from donating blood constitutes discrimination, and discrimination is always bad. Thus San Jose State, a good school that abhors discrimination, will maintain its virtue by refusing to participate in a discriminatory practice.

And, in so doing quite possibly cause the death of some local person or twenty who can’t get blood transfusions thanks to a shortage of donated blood. When the ban was first instituted, even sympathetic area officials were united in condemning it. Lisa Bloch, spokeswoman for San Francisco-based Blood Centers of the Pacific, called the decision irresponsible. “We completely understand the feeling that this regulation is unfair,” Bloch said. “But rather than join us in lobbying the FDA and talking to members of Congress, he’s putting patients at risk.”

The ban an example of absolutism gone crackers, frankly. To begin with, the F.D.A. is not engaging in discrimination, but rather is taking responsible precautions. If you are gay but have not had high-risk sexual relations withing the proscribed period, you can give blood. If you are a Lesbian or a celibate gay man, you can donate blood. If you are heterosexual but were in a risky environment where blood infections were common, or associated closely with someone from such an area, F.D.A. restrictions may disqualify you. To the extent that the F.D.A.’s duty to protect the blood supply excludes gay men and other groups, it is a case of making a legitimate distinction for an important reason. Discrimination, the bad kind, involves bigotry. This isn’t bigotry.

The position of the University is reminiscent of the old Peter Cook-Dudley Moore sketch, in which Moore, plying a one-legged man, claims discrimination because he isn’t given a change to audition for the part of Tarzan.

Pushed by campus gay rights advocates who maintain, like all single-issue zealots, that only their concerns matter and all others be damned, San Jose State University is taking the position that the avoidance of discrimination or anything that vaguely resembles it is an absolute imperative, justifying, in this case, suspending an activity that has only life-saving properties. As one student noted, “It’s like not having blood drives in San Francisco.”

Indeed it is. In addition to taking a stand where none is warranted, the campus ban also has zero chance of changing the F.D.A. policy, which is based on solid medical opinion. The HIV virus, as well as others, can be in the blood for weeks and months before it is detectable, and thus donation by individuals who may have been exposed to these pathogens endangers the blood supply. Again, this isn’t discrimination. “FDA’s policy is intended to protect all people who receive blood transfusions from an increased risk of exposure to potentially infected blood and blood products,” explains the F.D.A.

Evil, bigoted bastards!

Correctly accusing the University of a complete failure of perspective—absolutism doesn’t permit perspective, after all—uber-blogger Eugene Volokh nails the foolishness of its ban:

“Let’s assume for the sake of argument that the FDA is unwise in maintaining its blood exclusion policy. So what? So say the FDA is wrong — blood donations still save lives, including of course the lives of gay men. (I suspect that blood drives at universities do so even more than other blood drives, because they bring in donors who might continue to donate for the rest of their lives.) Why should the university suspend them, especially when they are conducted by organizations that are simply following the FDA’s instructions, rather than creating those instructions?”

Of course. But then, the ban isn’t designed to accomplish anything; it is only designed as a declaration of  purity…and the consequences to others, deadly though they might be, don’t matter a bit. With colleges teaching conduct like this, I wouldn’t expect this era of polarization and ideological deadlock to get better any time soon.