Wednesday, November 30th, 2005...10:34 am
Sorry, You Are Just Not Welcome
I was saddened last week to learn about the sudden death of Albert Soto. Soto was heavily involved in the life of this community, doing things ranging from helping to found the nationally recognized Borderlands Theater to pressuring TUSD to actually spend its desegregation money on, um, desegregation. He appeared annually in the Tucson Pastorela as the most cheerfully dastard depiction of the devil since Jon Lovitz.
Soto did something that a lot of us have done. He checked off the box on their driver’s licenses to be an organ donor. It doesn’t take much, but as the cliché goes, it can save a life, right?
Well, they don’t want Albert Soto’s organs. Soto was gay.
This policy emerged durring the early years of the AIDS crisis, when no one knew where the heck the disease came from or why it spread. On some level, I can understand the reasons for this policy 25 years ago, when there weren’t reliable tests for the disease and it seemed to be spread among gay men. Now, there is no excuse for the policy. In fact, the disease is spreading far faster among heterosexuals these days than among gay men.
Even though I regarded Soto as a friend, I knew nothing about his love life. Then again, neither do the people who crafted this policy. It isn’t being gay that causes the disease, it’s behavior, right?
Are we assuming that a gay man who is in a steady relationship for years is more likely to be infected than a heterosexual who can’t name who he took home from the Keys last Friday?
I was thinking that maybe someone should have said that Albert’s last words were, “Check the knockers on that broad…” Maybe then they’d take the organs.
4 Comments
November 30th, 2005 at 11:37 am
The FDA needs to revisit these rules. But then considering they will not even let Plan B be over the counter…they probably will not change the rules until we get a Democratic President.
December 1st, 2005 at 12:23 am
Cruel joke of the organ donation world… a man who had guts and was willing to give , and an organization that does not have the guts to receive.
December 1st, 2005 at 8:39 am
The American Red Cross revisited their own discriminatory policy about four years ago…and upheld it.
It certainly defies all logic and compassion.
December 3rd, 2005 at 12:35 pm
They aren’t really afraid of spreading AIDS via tissue transplantation.
They are instead afraid that a god-loving staunch Republican manly-man may receive his heart and then subsequently develop a fondness for Catwoman, musical theater, and pricey merlot.
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