Man Who Raised Money For Organ Donation Dies, Is Rejected As Organ Donor Because He Was Gay

I could see making an argument on either side of this ban ... depending mainly on whether I was offering to donate or I was in desperate need of a donation ... but its terms seem to suggest that gay men are assumed to be recklessly promiscuous even when their personal behavior and medical history are reasonably well documented, while breeders are assumed to be disease-free and monogamously virtuous even when they're selling blood for drug money or their organs have been "harvested" from people with dubious personal histories.

When Rohn Neugebauer, an otherwise-healthy 48-year-old man, died suddenly of a heart attack on March 16, his family knew he wanted to donate his tissue and organs to someone in need. Just a few months earlier, he had co-hosted a fundraiser for a local organ donation organization, the Center for Organ Recovery & Education (CORE), that had raised several thousand dollars.

At the hospital a couple hours after Rohn died, his sister Sandy Schultheis told ThinkProgress she patiently answered nearly 20 minutes of questions from a CORE representative about his health and medical history. Then came the final question: Had Rohn been in a homosexual relationship over the last 5 years?

When she answered that Rohn was a gay man in a long-term relationship, the CORE representative said that, as a result, her brother was not an eligible donor. The interview was over.

When is a blanket not a blanket?

There is no blanket prohibition on organ donations from sexually active gay men. Rather,CDC guidelines say that “men who have had sex with another man in the preceding 5 years… should be excluded from donation of organs or tissues unless the risk to the recipient of not performing the transplant is deemed to be greater than the risk of HIV transmission and disease.”

http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2014/03/28/3420274/gay-organ-donor/

Didn't we recently have a topic about the Red Cross not accepting blood donations from gay people?