LGBT activists in France are claiming discrimination regarding a current law banning homosexual men from donating blood unless they remain celibate for a year.

“48-year-old Laurent Drelon has filed a discrimination suit challenging France’s requirement that gay men abstain from sex for one year before donating blood,” reports LifeSiteNews. “The French Council of State upheld the rule last year.”

The lawsuit will go before the European Court of Human Rights. The one-year ban was originally meant as a compromise from a previous law that banned homosexuals from donating blood entirely. Drelon feels that even the one-year ban is a result of homophobia.

As noted by LifeSiteNews, the regulations against homosexual men donating blood stem from a Canadian blood scandal in the 1980s.

“In 1997, Justice Horace Krever released a landmark commission report on systemic failures in Canada’s blood donation system that allowed approximately 2,000 Canadians to become infected with HIV from tainted blood in the 1980s,” the outlet reports. “The report attributed the crisis to a variety of factors, one of which being the decision to import plasma acquired from high-risk populations in the United States.”

Laurent Drelon’s attorney says that not only is France’s rule discriminatory toward gay men, it violates their right to privacy.

“It’s the first time that the ECHR will make a decision on whether French legislation is discriminatory or not,” attorney Patrice Spinosi said, alleging it “is based solely on a person’s sex and sexual orientation … and violates the right to privacy.”

The frequency of HIV among homosexual men was highlighted by the Associated Press in 2015, which stated that “men who have had sex with other men represent about 2 percent of the U.S. population, yet account for at least 62 percent of all new HIV infections in the U.S.” The Centers for Disease Control admitted in 2013 that “approximately 62% of gay men who knew they were infected with HIV/AIDS continued engaging in unprotected sex anyway.”

In 2015, the United States ended its lifelong ban of homosexuals giving blood, replacing it with a one-year deferral for those who were sexually active. The United Kingdom has instituted the same policy.

Activists still consider the deferral policy discriminatory.

Source: dailywire