The Cynic had an opportunity to sit down with Dot Brauer, the Director of LGBTQA Services at UVM. We had the chance to talk to Brauer about various issues currently affecting the LGBTQA community. These are some excerpts from the full interview which will be available online in Podcast form.On the Red Cross resolution:-“I would really like to see the Red Cross held to a higher- the same standard as everybody else – not a higher standard. “We need to stop treating them [The Red Cross] like they’re Mother Theresa because they are just not. And you know, I don’t think Mother Theresa would have gotten the respect she did if she discriminated against people either.”-“It feels to me that the Red Cross has played a little bit of a game standing behind the FDA, that, if they do collect 55 percent of the blood supply, they have a lot of weight, and they could have used it a long time ago, and they made a very definite choice not to. “It’s an issue about political controversy, and I feel like they’ve been really dishonest, and I feel like they’ve really done a lot of hand-waving and smoke-blowing to try to pretend that they have had nothing to do with this, and they’ve had a lot to do with it.”-“I think on some level we know that discrimination is discrimination and that everybody should be -I don’t care what they’re doing-they should be held accountable to their practices. “I definitely don’t mean by that that they have the freedom not to follow FDA rules. “I completely get- I was so frustrated that that conversation kept going around and around because that was not the point. “-“Of course they have to follow the FDA rules. The point is, they could conduct themselves differently as they’re doing that. “They could be much less two-faced about where they stand on the issues. “And they could get much more – within they’re organization they could get much more directive with their personnel and with their messages that they disseminate about the nature of the discrimination, and the way in which the current policy doesn’t protect the blood supply effectively.” On the L/L graffiti:-“I get why somebody got frustrated and put that up there. I liken it to other instances where it feels like a governmental body has made a decision that doesn’t represent a community’s interests. That happens in the United States and all over the world, right?”Was it a Bias Incident?-“So it’s something that is used to intimidate a community of people. It relies upon a historical legacy.” -“At some point, if a group of people started putting out so many messages about calling heterosexual people “heterosexist,” and then like, bombing their houses, and you know, terrorizing them, then at some point you could start calling it a bias incident, because there would then be a legacy of intimidation of a community of people.”-“So it was definitely insulting, it was definitely an attack of sorts, but it probably didn’t make you feel unsafe on campus as another heterosexual male.”