NYT/AP: Remark About Gays Shadows St. Pat's Parade

Remark About Gays Shadows St. Pat's Parade
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: March 17, 2006


NEW YORK (AP) -- Protesters joined bagpipers, marching bands and thousands of flag-waving spectators at the St. Patrick's Day parade Friday after the parade's chairman compared gay Irish-American activists to neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan and prostitutes.

As huge, happy crowds lined the streets, the chairman, John Dunleavy, sidestepped questions about his remarks to The Irish Times.

''Today is St. Patrick's Day. We celebrate our faith and heritage, everything else is secondary,'' he said before the start of the Fifth Avenue parade.

Dunleavy set off a firestorm this week when he told the newspaper: ''If an Israeli group wants to march in New York, do you allow Neo-Nazis into their parade? If African Americans are marching in Harlem, do they have to let the Ku Klux Klan into their parade?''

Referring to the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization, Dunleavy said, ''People have rights. If we let the ILGO in, is it the Irish Prostitute Association next?''...


http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-St-Patricks-Day.html

an ignorant opinion.

but what else can come from a conservative tapeworm?

Ireland has made huge progress in terms of gay equality over the past 10 years. They are also dealing with their priest abuse scandal better than the American Catholic church has. Apart from having that constitutional ban on abortion (and I should point out, that's tolerated only because everyone knows that Irish women can go get abortions in London; it'll be the same way with the South Dakota ban if it's upheld--everyone wants to be able to say they're against abortion, but nobody really wants it to be actually impossible to get one, because they or their wife or daughter might need one someday, but I digress), Ireland is now more liberal on social issues than America is, because it's part of the EU and because they actually have a real labor movement.

Irish America, on the other hand, remains trapped in the 1950s, and wants to keep the American perception of Ireland trapped there too. It's bizarre.

C ya,

The Plaid Adder

in NYC. Going to CATHOLIC School back then, I did not even KNOW any family who had more than 3 kids. Must be a long line of "infertile Irish/American Catholics" even going to the "good old days of pre Roe and pre Griswold." :evilgrin:

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Yup, and it was the Saint Patrick's Day Parade Cmte, South Boston, Massachusetts, that brought a lawsuit all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court in order to keep out Irish gays in the South Boston's annual Saint Patrick's Day parade. Unconscionable!! South Boston, Massachusetts is an enclave of working class self-isolated uber-conservative Irish. The South Boston Irish won u/ a free speech 1st amendment claim that their freedom of speech would be diluted if they were forced u/ law to allow GLBTs march in the Saint Patrick's Day parade. In other words, SCOTUS allowed the uber-conservative sexual orientation discrimination to persist! So goes the working class Irish in America today. How sad.


Happy Saint Patty's Day to those who want to include all Irish! Indeed.

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...Wow

we can march in Cork, why can't we march in New York?''

Or LGBT-friendly tourists can snub the downtown parade and come to the one in Queens, formed in response to this problem http://www.stpatsforall.com/

Jews, Nazis
Blacks, KKK
Irish, ______

a:) Gays
b:) prostitutes
c:) Bailey's
e:) The English

You get 200 points just for putting your name on the paper, Dunleavy.

It's okay if you want to be Irish, but why do you have to wave it in our faces?