On March 4, 18 United States senators sent the Food and Drug Administration a letter urging it to remove its longstanding ban on blood donations from gay men. Iowa Senator Tom Harkin joined 16 other Democrats and Vermont Independent Bernie Sanders in signing the letter, in which they noted that “prospective donors who have engaged in heterosexual sexual activity with a person known to have HIV are deferred for one year. At the same time, male donors who engaged in protected homosexual sexual activity with a monogamous partner 26 years ago are deferred for life.”

In the early 1980s, very little was known about HIV or the syndrome to which it is a precursor, AIDS. The scientific community initially referred to AIDS as “gay-related immune deficiency” – GRID for short – after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identified its symptoms in five gay Los Angeles men in 1981. A year later, the CDC renamed the syndrome AIDS after it was discovered in a number of heterosexual Haitian immigrants, hemophiliacs, and heroin users. Still, HIV-AIDS was commonly perceived to be a gay man’s affliction, and in 1983 the FDA instituted a lifetime blood donation ban on any man who’d had sex with another man since 1977.

In the years to follow, the scientific community has learned a great deal more about HIV-AIDS and has improved its blood testing procedures dramatically. Recently, several prominent medical organizations – among them the American Red Cross, America’s Blood Centers, and the American Medical Association’s Council on Science and Public Health – have made the FDA aware that its ban does not stand up to medical and scientific scrutiny. Even so, in a statement of dubious accuracy earlier this month, the FDA told the Associated Press that “while FDA appreciates concerns about perceived discrimination, our decision to maintain the deferral policy is based on current science and data and does not give weight to a donor’s sexual orientation.”

Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, speaking to the AP for the same article, likened his new fight to legislation he supported and helped pass that nixed the travel and immigration bans on HIV-positive individuals last year. “Not a single piece of scientific evidence supports the ban,” he told the AP. Republicans have yet to join the senators’ cause, but gay rights advocates are hopeful that President Obama’s stated commitment to fighting against LGBT discrimination will help advance this and other issues.