On donating blood

After decades of bigoted discrimination, the FDA has finally caught on to science–somewhat.

Since forever, straight people–who have always been allowed to donate blood, many believing that they were in monogamous relationships–found out, the hard way, that their partners were cheating on them. But it was only gay men who were singled out as “unsafe”, first barred from donating blood for life, then required to be celibate for a year before they were allowed to donate blood.

It has forever been thus; being queer has always been considered tantamount to being promiscuous, careless and, too often, unclean.

Then COVID hit, and the numbers of people who could donate blood dwindled to the point of crisis.

And lo and behold, the FDA found out, rather quickly, that queer men can donate blood without compromising the health of transfusion recipients.

Who could have known?–other than non-bigoted people, that is.

White people, do not do this

This past weekend, that hateful “March for Life,” wherein right wing organizations and schools bus people in to DC to march for the “right” of men to control the lives of anyone born with an uterus, took place concurrently with the Indigenous Peoples March.

One of the schools that sent teens and chaperones to march this year was Covington Catholic High School, an all-male private school in Kentucky. There are long and terrible threads on twitter¹ with personal stories of survivors from both the school and the all-girls school across the street, which Covington assholes have nicknamed “whore school.” Charming boys, no?

At one point, a fairly large group of kids from Covington was facing off with four older members of another hate group, the Black Hebrew Israelites, and things were tense and likely heading to violence, when Omaha Elder Nathan Phillips, on his way to closing the Indigenous Peoples March at the Lincoln Memorial, intervened, placing himself between the two groups–and becoming the target of the white kids’ ire, once they were deprived of their original target.

There is video² and a plethora of articles about this harassment. There are interviews with witnesses AND with Nathan Phillips. Go google them.

There are also people defending the “boys” or rather, specifically, the white male teen wearing a MAGA hat, smirking with hateful disdain to the face of an elderly Native man.

Little girls grow up.

In January this year (yes, that’s like a century ago, but bear with me), over 160 women, teens and girls came forward to confront Larry Nassar, who for DECADES had abused them, while being shielded by the organization that should have protected all those young girls from becoming teens and adult women marked by sexual abuse.

One of those speaking was Kyle Stephens, who said (in part):

Making lists, checking them twice.

This post has existed in draft form for…well, yikes, almost two full years. Something came to light yesterday, that made me come back to it. And you, lucky readers, get to read my thoughts.

As I’ve mentioned before here and elsewhere, I do have a list of authors who, in my opinion, behave badly.¹  And, since my time, emotional labor, energy, and money, are limited, I quite simply refuse to even try their work. It’s still, at least in this small area, a free country.

By the same token, I have a much, much, much longer list of incredible people who are authors who will always get my support.