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While the Obama Administration and its "progressive" supporters in Congress insist they want a federal health care bill to protect people from deadly diseases, liberal senators led by John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Al Franken (D-Minn.) have pressured the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) into considering lifting the ban on male homosexuals donating blood. It's a decision that could mean disease and death for many Americans, and billions of dollars in additional health care costs.

"John Kerry Supports Gay Blood" declared a column on a pro-homosexual website. (web site)

Kerry, Franken and 16 other liberal senators insist they want the blood supply to remain safe and that donated blood must undergo two "highly accurate" tests that make the risk of tainted blood entering the blood supply virtually or nearly zero.

But writer and researcher Dale O'Leary says that male homosexuals, or men who have sex with men (MSM), as the FDA describes them, "expose themselves to such a wide variety of pathogens that medical professionals can never be sure that they have a test to identify every one of them. There could even now be something lurking out there, hidden in the blood of apparently healthy men, waiting."

O'Leary, the author of One Man, One Woman, and The Gender Agenda: Redefining Equality, is writing a forthcoming report on the medical and health impact of admitting open and active homosexuals into the U.S. Armed Forces.

"Senator Kerry argues that this policy is now arcane because we have tests to determine if donated blood carries the HIV, but the problem is not the diseases we know of and have tests for but the diseases which we haven't identified as sexually transmitted and blood borne and don't have tests for," O'Leary points out.

If the ban on gay blood is lifted, she warns, "The lives of all those who receive blood products are at risk. Hemophiliacs have every right to be worried, in the 1980's they saw their community virtually destroyed by contaminated blood. We simply can't be too careful. MSM are not at risk because they can't donate blood. In fact, the prohibition may serve as a warning to them and others that certain behaviors carry an unacceptable risk."

Tom Fahey, a man with hemophilia and HIV, formed an organization called the Committee of Ten Thousand to represent the estimated ten thousand people in the U.S. with HIV as a result of the blood transfusions needed to ensure clotting. In the past, this group, as well as the National Hemophilia Foundation, have defended the ban on gay men donating blood.

The proposed policy change is being driven by Senators Kerry and Franken and supported by Kirsten Gillibrand, Dick Durbin, Daniel Akaka, Sheldon Whitehouse, Sherrod Brown, Frank Lautenberg, Bob Casey, Bernie Sanders, Russ Feingold, 
Mark Udall, Maria Cantwell, Carl Levin, Tom Harkin, Mark Begich, Roland Burris, and Michael Bennet.

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