In the Food and Drug Administration’s bravest effort yet to combat the spread of HIV, they’ve decided it’s best to ban sexually-active gay men from donating sperm anonymously because men who have sex with men fall in the high-risk category for contracting the virus.

According to Lester Crawford, the FDA’s acting commissioner (appointed by President Bush), the new rule was developed in response to “many concerned consumers, associations and tissue establishments.”

OK, Lester, let’s examine our options before restricting the rights of millions of Americans. The federal government could require instead that all anonymous donations be quarantined for a six-month period, per your agency’s rules. Each donor would be tested at the beginning and end of that period for all sexually-transmitted diseases, including HIV. In fact, many sperm banks across the nation already do just that.

Now, not to confuse you by bringing ethics into the discussion, but leaders are supposed to be better than the rest of us at making decisions based on fact, and not succumbing to the politics of fear. It’s called “considering the source.” Did you have a frank discussion with these “concerned” entities about what exactly their concerns were? Like, as in, did you bring up the fact that your agency could instead mandate that all sperm be quarantined for a six-month period then ask them to restate their concern in light of that proposal? That, my dear, is called the “follow-up question.” It helps to get to the root of the matter.

Leland Traiman of Rainbow Flag sperm bank in Alameda put it best when he told The Associated Press, “Under these rules, a heterosexual man who had unprotected sex with HIV-positive prostitutes would be OK as a donor one year later, but a gay man in a monogamous, safe-sex relationship is not OK unless he’s been celibate for five years.”

Maybe you could have posed a similar scenario to those “concerned” entities that lobbied you. Because their concerns aren’t based on science, they’re based on bigotry. But maybe your decision to listen to them is also based on bigotry.

If we want to follow your argument to its conclusion then let’s ban college students next. Jeez, those kids have the highest rate of STD infection in the nation. They should really be the next to go. Better find another way to make a quick $20, boys!

What all this really says is that your agency still thinks HIV/AIDS is a “gay disease.” In a brilliant coup, our nation’s leading health policy-setters have forced shut the door of responsible dialogue on how to curb the HIV/AIDS pandemic and placed the dictatorship of stereotyping firmly back into power.