Makes sense. EFF knows the law as well as anyone, the concern here is that they could be entangled in as-yet-unknown legal disputes because of their use of bitcoin. That'd be wasteful of both bitcoin and regular currency donations.
I think it makes sense for them to step up and admit that they don't understand the law surrounding bitcoin well enough to be comfortable accepting it. There's no point in assuming an unknown-sized risk just for bitcoin when there's other things in their mission they can work towards.
I'd hate to see the EFF financially decimated merely because they accepted bitcoin donations. They are useful people, let them pick their battles.
That said, I think it's fair for the Bitcoin people to feel abandoned by the EFF for their sudden refusal to deal with btc without a thorough legal explanation that others could work with. The EFF is pretty much who you'd expect to fight for this type of project and for them to take a sudden and largely unexplained hands-off stance is odd.
They do say "[this laundry list of laws] [are potentially related]" but they're aware of the "three felonies a day" nature of our society. What isn't potentially illegal?
Besides, most of those issues would go away if they simply resold their btc immediately and claimed that as the donation value.
I can see that they don't want to be seen as endorsing the use of Bitcoin specifically, especially storing value in it, but if they immediately resold their btc they'd be using it safely (to avoid a hypothetical btc crash wiping out their funds) and promoting responsible usage of any payment service (storing money in Paypal accounts is a notorious no-no, even though it's denominated in USD).
I think it makes sense for them to step up and admit that they don't understand the law surrounding bitcoin well enough to be comfortable accepting it. There's no point in assuming an unknown-sized risk just for bitcoin when there's other things in their mission they can work towards.
I'd hate to see the EFF financially decimated merely because they accepted bitcoin donations. They are useful people, let them pick their battles.