No lives to be saved

Eugene Volokh looks at San Jose State's decision to suspend blood drives. San Jose State University Continues to Suspend All Blood Drives on Campus.

Why? Apparently based on the view that the FDA’s ban on donation by men who have had sex with men since 1977 violates the school’s antidiscrimination policy.

But it seems to me that, regardless of that, suspending a practice as worthy and lifesaving as blood donation because of disagreement with the policy strikes me as showing a massive lack of perspective. I wrote about this with regard to the exclusion of military recruiters in 2002, and the arguments strike me as even more apt here, so let me adapt and repost them:

“Perspective,” my New Shorter Oxford Dictionary says, is “a mental view of the relative importance” of things.
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When I’ve made this argument about military recruiting, some people have responded “Well, we wouldn’t let a law firm interview if it discriminated against gays; why should we let the military do so?” Yup, that’s right, the military, it’s just another bigoted law firm, people who run blood drives are just another bigoted government agency. Jones & Smith, the U.S. Army, blood drives, same difference. That’s what the logic of antidiscrimination-above-all tells us.

But perspective reminds us that those institutions that protect our lives deserve slightly more accommodation — yes, even despite what we may see as their vices — than institutions that don’t. And any morality and any symbolism that fails to keep this proper perspective is not a morality or symbolism to live by.