POLITICS *rasberries* !

The week isn't over and I'm fed up to here with politics. Politics make me homicidal at the best of times, suicidal at the worst.

The Labor party wants Amanda Vanstone to resign over her remarks about using a broken wine glass to terrorise a person on a plane or how to dispose of a boss with a sharp pencil. In my opinion the most important thing she said was that some precautions were only there to make us FEEL safe. To me she sounds like someone who's tired of carrying the can for Ruddock and Howard's mistakes.

Tony Abbott, I can't even think about rationally. A very sharp, very pointed stick for him and not in his eye.

Kim Beazley lost the plot a few times but did okay on the IR protests. I don't care if you howl me down, I still say he's not entirely a well man.

Mr. Olexander doing a Latham on the Victorian Liberals. It kills me to say this but if the party was that homophobic why did they endorse you in the first place? (in the closet) You got yourself dumped because you broke the cardnal rule of the libs - you got caught! You could have driven to Darwin and back, tanked to the gills and they wouldn't have cared but you got caught. You are a hypocrite to show up their homophobia now that you've got nothing to lose.
How much better you would have served the Gay community by exposing their attitudes while you still had a seat in Parliament and had a lot to lose. Sorry, I'm not buying the "I'm gay and look what they've done to me" sob story because if you hadn't been dumped, you'd still be toeing the party line with your mouth firmly shut.

Now not strictly politics as in Parliament, but a political and divisive issue within the Gay community. Rodney Croome has spoken about it, QueerPenguin has a good post about it, Australian Coalition for Equality has the story, various AIDS organizations have combined and taken out full page ads. Instead of being a simple issue of one gay man wanting to donate blood, it's now become a bun fight over whether it is a right to donate blood and whether that blood can be trusted to be HIVneg. The AIDS groups say no to blood from gay men which others say makes a mockery out of their safe sex campaign.
I'm a straight female so I'm outside this issue and I have already blogged about it. Perhaps it isn't a given right to donate blood but we do have a right to perform a civic duty otherwise why would Howard be telling us to dob in our muslim neighbour who buys a bag of fertilizer for his roses. I tend to agree with QueerPenguin that the AIDS orgs. are covering their backs. As I have said elsewhere if a gay man is going to go through the process of giving blood, why would he lie about his contacts? If he was that much of a party animal why would he even bother with a civic duty? Straight men lie about picking up a prostitute, male or female. Would a woman totally trusting her husband even think about testing for HIV? Consider the report out this week which shows heterosexual HIV infection has risen from 7 per cent of new diagnoses before 1996 to more than 23 per cent in 2004.

It's up to the government to help research a quicker more effective testing procedure for HIV or start research into artificial blood. With the holiday season almost here, not to mention the projected terror attacks 'whenever' and their demand on blood supplies, the issue must be decided once and for all but make it about the HIV blood testing efficiency not about the blood givers.