Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, Rosh yeshiva of Ateret Yerushalayim (formerly Ateret Cohanim), on Tuesday, attacked the health ministry and Magen David Adom, saying, “No attempt to flatter deviant organizations will help – we will not donate blood through MDA,” Kipa reported.
Rabbi Aviner said that by donating blood and using the new forms, which replace the donor’s “father” and “mother” with “parent 1” and “parent 2,” blood donors give legitimacy to transgressors. “Until they restore the real form, we will not be able to donate through MDA,” he reiterated.
Last year, then-Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz (Meretz), who is openly gay, removed the ban on homosexual men’s blood donations less than 12 months following their last sexual contact with another man, and altered the form to be filled by donors to say, instead of father’s and mother’s name, “Parent 1,” and “Parent 2,” to cater to same-sex couples. Horowitz also instructed MDA to erase the country-of-origin item for both parents.
Here’s where PC can kill, for real: two groups, “Choosing Family,” and “Musari) (Heb=Moral), told the High Court of Justice that knowing who the actual father or mother is can be crucial when it comes to the operation of the blood bank, as is knowing where in the world they came from.
The two groups told the court that the health ministry and MDA refused to reveal how they went about making decisions that required knowing the identity of the father and mother of a donor, and their country of origin. They won’t make this information available even after the Justice Ministry’s Freedom of Information Dept. rebuked them for stonewalling. And that was Gideon Sa’ar’s justice ministry.
After last November’s change of governments, Deputy Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office and Noam Chairman MK Avi Maoz demanded in his coalition agreement with Likud that the Horowitz alterations are removed and blood donations would be restricted to people who were born to a father and a mother. Close to four months later, when nothing had changed, Rabbi Aviner made his ruling.
Rabbi Aviner added that the very act of accepting a form that includes this allowance for a deviant behavior that is prohibited by the Torah constitutes aiding and abetting a capital transgression. He also rejected the argument that donating blood even with the altered form is allowed because of “pikuach nefesh” (saving a life), since when donating blood the recipient is not lying on his death bed before the donor, and, for instance, we may not desecrate Shabbat over a pikuach nefesh that is not instantaneous.
Rabbi Aviner urged donors to avoid the MDA blood collection stations and volunteer directly at the hospitals, which would be only too happy to receive their blood while keeping the names of mom and dad intact.
