In a move that is sure to stir debate, San Jose State University president Don Kassing has banned blood drives on his campus.

Kassing said the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s position forbidding gay men from donating blood conflicts with both California’s and SJSU’s policy prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Most of us agree the FDA ban makes no sense. The policy amounts to a lifetime ban against donating blood for any man who has had sex with another man, even protected sex with an HIV-negative partner.

The FDA adopted the policy in 1983; it reaffirmed it last May, largely due to urging from right-wing groups who want to keep laws that stigmatize gay people.

However, the GLBT community hasn’t called for a boycott, because despite our concern with the ban, we fear for the nation’s blood supply. And boycotting campus blood drives would have an undesirable effect because the Red Cross reports that upwards of 20 percent of blood donations come from college students.

Certainly banning them, as Kassing has done, is not the solution. While I applaud Kassing’s gutsy position, there’s something else he can do to thwart anti-gay bias without harming the nation’s blood supply: lobbying for SJSU and other CSU campuses to stop subsidizing colleges, such as Navy, BYU, and Notre Dame, that have anti-gay policies or fail to offer domestic partnership benefits to their employees.

Sen. Christine Kehoe has attempted to make it clear that such bans are not the answer. And the SJSU ban is bound to draw the ire of the Legislature and Congress. So look for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger or CSU Chancellor Charles Reed to issue an executive order prohibiting them. If that doesn’t happen, Congress is likely to pass something akin to the Soloman Amendment, which denies federal funds to colleges that don’t allow military recruiters.

Rather than merely penalizing schools with anti-gay policies, however, we can use this matter to our advantage. It is an opportunity to strengthen other federal and state laws barring discrimination based upon sexual orientation.

Specifically, we want the federal law known as Title IX to specifically prohibit anti-gay bias, and we want the Department of Education to investigate and stop schools receiving federal funds from engaging in anti-gay bias, just as we do with schools that practice race discrimination.

This summer CSU Fresno lost three suits by former women’s coaches to whom juries collectively awarded $30 million because of either gender, race, or sexual orientation discrimination.

A Jan. 15 story in the Santa Cruz Sentinel shows the problems openly gay student athletes face.

Brice Dahlmeier is an elite athlete at UC Santa Cruz. He won the 2005 Santa Cruz Coast Athletic League boys volleyball MVP award while at Aptos High. He has started for the UC Santa Cruz men’s volleyball team since his freshman year. He’s earning two separate undergraduate degrees, one from UCSC in environmental science and one from UC Berkeley in civil engineering.

The paper reports that Dahlmeier is openly gay, which is not a problem for his teammates. But Dahlmeier reports that “at away games, there’s hecklers and whatnot. It’s common to hear ‘You’re gay’ or ‘Nice hair, faggot.’ It’s an easy insult. I just kind of shrug it off as ignorance. Being gay isn’t something that defines a person. It’s just a part of who I am. I just kind of have to ignore it, I guess, laugh it off.”

Dahlmeier shouldn’t have to tolerate this abuse in any venue in the United States, especially a venue regulated by the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Yet his story underscores the problem for gay and lesbian athletes.

In college basketball, referees may have fans ejected, issue a technical foul on them or stop a game and declare a forfeit. It’s a given that they would do this if fans were using the “n” word in reference to black players. While the nature of competitive sports requires players to assume risk of heckling, when that heckling crosses the line and becomes hate speech, it’s not just abusive to the athlete, but to all.