opinionjournal.com

San Jose State University has banned blood drives on campus as "discriminatory," reports the San Mateo County (Calif.) Times:

The rise of AIDS in the 1980s prompted the FDA to prohibit donations from men who had sex with men any time after 1977. These days, groups such as the American Red Cross say that lifetime prohibition is excessive, since modern blood testing will catch any diseases contracted more than three weeks before the donation.

They've lobbied for years for officials to relax the restriction on blood donation to one year after the latest sexual activity, but to no avail.
Gay rights groups on several college campuses, including Stanford's, have held protests on the issue in recent years. At San Jose State, it was an employee's complaint last year that prompted [SJSU president Don] Kassing's office to investigate whether the rule made blood drives discriminatory.
They decided it did, since gay men were being treated differently than other groups of people with similar risk factors.
"What San Jose State has done is to take an institutional position based on principles, based on values," said Larry Carr, the university's associate vice president for public affairs.

Well, how satisfying that must be for San Jose State University. Yet the paper reports "local blood banks say that position comes at a steep cost"--some 1,000 pints of blood a year gathered in drives on the campus. All this to protest a rule that clearly is not discriminatory in intent, and whose continued existence surely represents an abundance of caution rather than any antigay animus.
But hey, if patients suffer because there's not enough blood, that's just a price that has to be paid for this principled stand. Don Kassing's conscience simply will not allow him to do the right thing.