My own fear of needles has driven me from blood drives for years. Of any philanthropic effort, my involvement with blood drives will probably always be kept to a minimum. But courage in the face of needles is a small checkmark on the huge list of requirements to be a blood donor.

There are other hurdles I’d have to leap in order to donate. I grew up in the United Kingdom; had I undergone a blood transfusion during my residency there, I would not be eligible to donate blood. My family also carries traits for anemia, another part of the screening process for potential donors. These limitations are the more obscure of the items listed on the Red Cross’ eligibility guidelines, which can be found at redcross.org.

Those with asthma, for example, may not be eligible. High blood pressure, cancer, diabetes or even the common cold can prevent donations as well.

All of the requirements on the Red Cross’ list, actually, are solely based upon medical data – the requirements are derived from a statistical game of better-safe-than-sorry. Sadly, at least one of the requirements comes attached with a stigma: the requirement barring sexually active gay men from donating blood.

To quote the Red Cross’s eligibility requirements: “Those who are at increased risk for becoming infected with HIV are not eligible to donate blood. According to the Food and Drug Administration, you are at increased risk if . you are a male who has had sex with another male since 1977, even once.”

The requirements do not state that there is a direct link between being gay and having AIDS. It’s based solely on statistics. Not homophobia. Not religion. Numbers. But, alas, the glory that is ignorance shines through.

Last week, there was a muffled outcry on campus that the blood drive was a homophobic event, for it limited gay males from being a part of the philanthropic effort. Through the screening process, any sexually active gay man cannot be a part of the blood drive, an event otherwise open to the public. Or is it?

Discrimination is probably not the best way to describe what happened when a gay ISU professor approached workers at the blood drive last week and asked what questions were involved in the screening process. In an e-mail to his colleagues, the professor wrote, “The signs on the doorway to the Great Hall urged me to share my plasma and platelets as I entered the building. But if I go through the doorway they will ask me if I have sex with men. I will say `yes,’ and they will excuse me.”

Ignorance, however, is the only way to describe what happened when a graduate student later approached the workers and asked why only men were questioned regarding sexual orientation. The nurse speaking to the graduate student decided to include slightly more information than what was on her script. She told the student that, other than being categorized as a high-risk demographic for being HIV-positive, gay men were committing acts against God.

Say, that doesn’t sound like unbiased medical fact as given by a professional working with students in a community effort to collect blood donations.

“Typically, these men contract HIV because their lifestyle goes against God’s will,” in the words of the nurse, an employee of the blood center of Central Iowa; not affiliated with the American Red Cross, according to a graduate student.

Sounds like you’re mixing preaching and prescriptions, lady. You paid to do that?

Not anymore, thankfully. The nurse was asked to leave the blood drive.

The statistics regarding HIV may support the Red Cross’ decision. The problem is with those who take the statistics and twist them to be a homophobic assumption: Gay men cannot donate blood because they probably carry HIV, or even that HIV is a punishment for being gay. This is the mistake of the nurse – she assumed she could use the statistical data of the Center for Disease Control and the Red Cross as a platform for her own religious beliefs.

Whether she felt it right, she should have known as a medical professional that it was not her place to interject her opinion on the matter.

The bulleted list on the Red Cross’ eligibility requirements includes more than whether the donor is a male who has had sex with another male, even once, since 1977. Those taking your blood will also want to know if you have ever used a needle, even once, to take drugs or steroids not prescribed by a physician; if you were born in or lived in Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Niger or Nigeria since 1977; if you have ever had a positive test for HIV virus. The list extends beyond sexual orientation.

What happened at our blood drive is ridiculous and sad. A medical professional working at a community event with students should not speak such ignorant remarks. She was there to take blood, not to beat the Bible.

Yes, the data is backed by the Red Cross. No, the screening requirements aren’t at fault here – the local blood drive was only following suit with the standards set at a national level. Better safe than sorry. Better to leave questionable blood out of the blood bank’s system all together. The Red Cross is simply not willing to take the risk of taking blood from those it categorizes as at a high risk of contracting HIV. What’s at fault here is not the data, but the limited vision of narrow minds that cannot break the link between the numbers and homophobia.

Cavan Reagan is a senior in journalism and mass communication and English from Bellevue, Neb. He is news editor of the Daily.