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LGBT Network have been calling for this reviw of the blanket ban on gay and bi men giving blood since we raised it at Scottish Parliament last year. We presented an array of evidence from around the world that showed it is not protecting the saftey of blood by having a blanket ban on gay and bi men and allowing all straight people to donate no matter who they had sex with and when.

Our evidence we presented to parliament is available here http://www.lgbtnetwork.eu/?page_id=1024  and you can see for yourself how a change in the criteria is best to keep blood products safe.

Unlike Stonewall and others, this ban cannot just be seen as discrimination. No one has a right to be a blood donor, but those who are allowed to donate blood have a responsibility to practice safe sex. We know many many gay and bi men do, and many, many straight men do not.

Therefore to make blood as safe as possible, the donor eligibility should be based on factors such as when was the last time a person had unprotected sex or sex with a new partner and when did the person last have an HIV test. An HIV negative man who is having safe sex with another man is prevented from donating, yet a straight man who had unprotected sex with a woman he KNEW to be HIV + can donate after a year.

This is part of a larger need for us to look again at HIV. As we showed in our evidence to parliament, the majority of new infections are from heterosexual people. HIV is something we all must think about, we all must protect ourselves and we all must get tested, regularly.

Reviewing the donor eligibility criteria for blood donations is an important first step in creating a new attitude to HIV that is based on facts not fear, and this review is a good move towards that.

It is great to see the Prime Minister speak so strongly against the passage of Proposition 8. It has been horrific to sit and watch as so many families hang on the balance as their marriages are deliberated in the California Supreme Court; and Gordon Browns’ description of this malicious attempt to tear families apart as “unacceptable” adds to the broad and diverse coalition of those who believe that marriage is ours by right.

New jersey, Illinois, Hawaii, even the Mormon ruled state of Utah, are all grappling with this issue, well over a half century since Separate but Equal was ruled unconstitutional. Today it is still the dominant feature of the civil rights question, as it has been in days gone by.

 Martin Luther King, told us over and over he had been to the mountain top; that he had seen the Promised Land, and it was going to be built in the deepest, racist and most violent part of the south – that out of segregation, a nation of equality could be built.

Well we have seen it too. We know what our promised land looks like because we have lived it; in Massachusetts, in Connecticut, in Spain and South Africa, and for too little time we lived it in California.

It is time it comes here.

Tuesday 17^th March, the Scottish Parliament will step into that ever growing line of legislatures who have been held accountable before their citizens as we ask for the rights we have been promised. The Prime Minister has called this inequality in Marriage unacceptable, he is right. There are couples clamouring at the gates of churches who will gladly marry them before the eyes of God but right now the law says no.

The law says no, we cannot have what others take for granted. The law says no, we cannot tell the world about our husbands or our wives and no, we cannot be equal in our own land.

As the law says no, we can respond only with yes. Yes, we can live as if we are married, we have done it. Yes, we can build a family, we are doing it; and yes, we deserve equality from a government we elect, and that we equally pay for.

We don’t yet live in the Promised Land, but by God we’ve seen it. We can move that mountain and we can have what is ours and it can start in the Scottish Parliament on Tuesday, 17^th March. Let us not come back from the brink of equality as other places fall to separate but equal, let us not be scared or cynical as we listen to those who only hate, but let us say yes, yes we can have our Promised Land and yes we can have it here.