Print

Mail

wiki links

Gay row ban continues over St. Patrick's Day parade

As Manhattan's massive St. Patrick's Day parade made its way through the city on Friday, its chief organizer was being condemned for a bizarre outburst in which he said that allowing gay groups to join the event would be like allowing Nazis to march at an Israeli parade.

"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?" march chairman John Dunleavy said in a newspaper interview, reigniting an argument that has marred every St. Patrick's Day in New York for the past 15 years.

Crowds of up to 2 million were expected to gather to watch the city's 244th parade. But the celebrations were clouded by Dunleavy's remarks. The chairman of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, defending his organization's longstanding exclusion of gay marchers, claimed that allowing the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization (Ilgo) to participate would set a precedent.

"If we let the Ilgo in, is it the Irish Prostitute Association next?" he asked.

"It's shocking that Mr Dunleavy hates gay people so much. What have we ever done to him?" Alan van Capelle, director of the Empire State Pride Agenda, a campaign group, told the New York Daily News.

The Ancient Order of Hibernians has vocally opposed gay participation in the march since 1991, when members of Ilgo were denied permission to march but participated anyway, as invited guests of New York's then-mayor, David Dinkins. They, and he, were subjected to verbal abuse and pelted with beer cans.

Protests in the years since then have sometimes seen up to 60 people arrested.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg has called on the organizers to reconsider their position.

Christine Quinn, an Irish-American who is now the first openly gay leader of the New York city council, was arrested in 1999. This year she had been negotiating with the march organizers in an attempt to resolve the dispute, proposing that the gay marchers abandon their banners and wear discreet buttons or sashes instead.

"It's a nice compromise, and then his response is this stuff about Nazis and the Klan," said Paul Schindler, editor of Gay City News, a New York weekly.
This story has been viewed 1393 times.