Since When Did The FDA Dictate Criminal Policy?

We’ve listened to, and posted, a lot of Alan Colmes’ interviews with right-wing figures here in the past, but I don’t think we’ve ever come across one as frustrating and contentious as last night’s interview with the AFA’s Bryan Fischer. 

I can say for sure that I have never heard Colmes use the word “weasel” so many times in one interview, but it was entirely warranted as he had brought Fischer on to discuss his position that “those ‘who practice homosexuality’ should come under the purview of the law just as much as those who take people captive in order to sell them into slavery.” 

But Fischer refused to do so, stating, as he did in his follow-up post yesterday, that he never explicitly said that gays should be imprisoned, insisting rather that his point was that gays should be treated exactly the same as intravenous drug abusers. 

When Colmes attempted to get Fischer to explain just what he thinks should happen to drug abusers (and, by extension, gays) Fischer refused to say, simply repeating that whatever the policy is, it ought to be the same for gays.

It went on for twenty minutes as Colmes tried to get Fischer to defend and explain his point, while Fischer played games with semantics and pretended that he was doing so: 

Basically, Fischer’s position is that if the law says that drug users get jail time and/or rehabilitation, then that is what should happen to gays as well.  And that view seems to rest entirely upon FDA policy banning gay men and intravenous drug users from donating blood.

I have no idea why Fischer thinks that this FDA policy regarding blood donation means that drug use and gay sex are exactly the same thing and ought to be treated the same in all regards. 

His logic seems to be that:

Intravenous drug use can spread HIV;

Gay male sex can spread HIV;

Intravenous drug use is illegal;

Therefore gay male sex should be illegal.

Of course, intravenous drug use is illegal not because it can spread HIV, but because all drug use is illegal.  Drug use has been illegal for decades in this country, long before the emergence of HIV. 

It is not the spread of HIV that makes drug use illegal, it is the drug use itself that is illegal. 

The fact that the FDA bans both intravenous drug users and gay men from donating blood is fundamentally irrelevant to the legality of either drug use or gay sex. 

For that matter, you know who else is banned from donating blood:

People who have received transplants of animal tissue or organs are excluded from giving blood because of the still largely unknown risks of transmitting unknown or emerging pathogens harbored by the animal donors. People who have recently traveled to or lived abroad in certain countries may be excluded because they are at risk for transmitting agents such as malaria or variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD).

So, using Fischer’s logic, organ donors and people who have lived abroad ought to be subject to the same punishments/treatments as drug users, since they too are banned by the FDA from donating blood for the very same reasons.