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Celebrating the banning o' the gay

By adamg on Tue, 06/21/2005 - 1:58pm

Southie once again held a festive little gathering to commemorate the anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling that lets the locals bar gays from the St. Patrick's Day parade:

... "It's a day that shouldn't go unremembered," said John "Wacko" Hurley, the parade's organizer, who had 9-0, signifying the US Supreme Court's unanimous ruling, imprinted on his business cards after the 1995 decision. "It was too important."

Carpundit would like a word with Wacko and some local pols:

... They hate gays, and they're proud of it. It is disgraceful that Justice Nolan and Councilor Kelly joined in this celebration of bias. By the way, South Boston sucks, and I don't know why anyone would want to live or march among those insular inbreds anyway.

Topics: 
Holidays
Free tagging: 
LGBTQ
St. Patrick's Day


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Comments

By Dave on Tue, 06/21/2005 - 3:03pm.

Whatever your thoughts on the people running the parade, the SCOTUS made the right decision. Your First Amendment right to free expression doesn't extend to forcing others to convey your message. There's freedom of the press, but I can't force the Boston Globe to print what I want them to print.

By eeka on Tue, 06/21/2005 - 4:51pm.

...the Boston Globe isn't using public land and public police officers to spread their message.

Also, sometimes it's appropriate to exclude a certain group, if the way the group is being excluded is by virtue of the gathering being aimed toward a mutually exclusive group of people. A gathering of men being organized for the purpose of men discussing issues of men's health and men's studies and the experiences of men in society would by nature exclude women by focusing on men. But a group of people gathering to discuss their experiences as dentists who decided not to allow women to participate would be exlcusionary. Similarly, a group that's organizing a festival of Irish culture might have grounds for excluding me if I wanted to march with a sign saying "I'm an Eastern European Jew with no ties to the Irish community but I want to march because I'm an ass," because I'm expressing that I'm there to take away from their festivities and mess with people, but they don't have any grounds for excluding groups of people who align with Irish culture, and it's bigoted to do so. Unless they organize themselves as a group that is specifically celebrating the culture of Irish straight people and they're actually taking steps to explore straight Irish culture and are providing information and resources relating to straight Irish culture. Otherwise, a festival billing itself as "Irish" shouldn't be allowed to exclude any people who align with Irish culture and wish to participate.

By Dave on Wed, 06/22/2005 - 12:26am.

How does the Boring Broadsheet get from Morrissey Blvd. to my doorstep to the bottom of my bird's cage without use of public land? ;-)

You may be pointing out an example of bigotry, but it's a constitutional right for them to exclude people who want to use their parade to get a message across that they don't want to express. The homosexual Irish group can organize their own parade and exclude the Wacko bunch.

By Josh on Wed, 06/22/2005 - 10:10am.

There may be a constitutional right not to be forced to espouse a message or associate with a group of people with which/whom you don't agree (the use of public funds makes it a closer question), but the legal issue is really secondary to the moral one: Even if we agree, for the sake of argument, that the parade organizers did have the right to exclude gay marchers (and we may as well assume that, since the Sup. Court said so), they're still a bunch of bigots. White supremacists also have a constitutional right to march and hoot and holler, but that doesn't make them any less racist. In the end, if the participants in the annual "We Hate Gays" luncheon don't have the sense to realize how awful and ignorant their showboating makes them look, all the better: everyone else can learn what not to do from their example.

By carpundit on Tue, 06/21/2005 - 4:38pm.

I wasn't writing about the law.

Regardless of the merits of the decision, gathering for the sole purpose of celebrating the exclusion of gays from one's parade is mere bigotry.

By Anonymous on Wed, 06/22/2005 - 3:18pm.

The bigotry charges come out pretty quickly these days, any chance some of these people were merely celebrating the fact that the Court wouldn't let another group tell them what to do?

Self-determination is a lot more powerful urge than bigotry afterall.

By carpundit on Wed, 06/22/2005 - 4:23pm.

I think bigot is tossed around a lot these days, often quickly.

But, no, there is no chance they were celebrating a legal decision. They were celebrating their victory over gays, and the affirmation of their deeply-held beliefs that gays are lesser people than they.

If they felt otherwise they wouldn't have denied the right to march in the first place.

By scott on Wed, 06/22/2005 - 6:28am.

Who was right and who was wrong? You can`t celebrate the Supreme Court agreeing with you without being a bigot? Are we to believe by extension that the half a million people who went to this parade are actually something like a giant Klan rally?

By carpundit on Wed, 06/22/2005 - 8:09am.

Wacko Hurley and pals were not gathered to celebrate the SCOTUS ruling. They were gathered to celebrate their successful campaign to get gays out of the parade. If they could get them out of town, too, they would.

Who was right and who was wrong? On the law that allows private parties to monopolize public streets, it seems the Hibernians were right. On the issue of human rights and basic fairness, they were wrong. They are bigots and homophobes.

No, I don't think the parade attendees are *all* guilty of the same mindset, but I'll wager there's a strong correlation.

By eeka on Wed, 06/22/2005 - 12:00pm.

That's why I think that event organizers, if they're asserting a right to exclude any group, should have to have this clearly presented in the name and description of the event. Then people can decide whether they want to atttend the Straight Irish Cultural Festival or have their child participate in the Straightboy Scouts. Because "Irish" includes GLBT individuals and St. Patrick's Day has GLBT observers. "Boys" also includes gay, bisexual, and transgender boys. If the name and description of the event and group don't clearly state who's included and who isn't, then people might participate without being properly informed that they're really participating in hatred. I think that a lot of people attended the parade without knowing it was only for groups of all straight people. It wouldn't accomplish anything to view these people as hateful. But I do think the public deserves to be informed of the exact message behind a PUBLIC EVENT so people can make an informed decision whether to go.

By Anonymous on Wed, 06/22/2005 - 3:21pm.

So you want to start the Department of Proper Event Description? Is that a state or federal body?

By eeka on Wed, 06/22/2005 - 9:49pm.

Ignoring your sarcasm, as well as your lack of enough confidence to put a name on your opinions, I'd say that it needs to only apply to events or groups that use public resources. The group should have to fill out some sort of application on file with the state or city or school district or whoever is letting them use public (taxpayer) resources, stating exactly what their group stands for. The form would list who is and is not welcome to the event and would list any financial affiliations the group has, an overview of activities they've participated in in the past year, and so forth. The municipality could then review this and could require that any promotional material mentioning the public space being used would give an accurate description of the group in terms of who is and is not involved and what the mission of the group appears to be given the past year's activities. A group that's contributed money to anti-gay groups could not bill activities held in public spaces as "family" activities or "Christian" activities, because families often have GLBT members and most Christians are not anti-gay, so these titles would be offensive to and reflect poorly on many taxpayers who are families, Christian, GLBT, etc. They'd need to call their group an "anti-gay" group and their activity the "anti-gay ice cream social" or whatever. If they wanted to hold their event in a private space, then they could call it whatever they wanted.

By scott on Thu, 06/23/2005 - 6:42am.

You`ll find that Southie actually supports gay marriage at a comparable or higher rate than other parts of Boston and its suburbs. Its just a target for people who want to get their face on TV.

I know that is a shock to eeka`s ilk who are actually visciously anti-Catholic (see WGC, Winter Hill thread). So, I wonder how Roslindale, West Roxbury, Roxbury or Brighton stack up against Southie? I bet not as well as some holier-tha-thou residents would like to think. Those areas resisted busing just like the rest and the new yuppies that live there are obviously unaware of the facts.

By adamg on Thu, 06/23/2005 - 7:49am.

Roslindale doesn't keep electing vitrolic haters like Jimmy Kelly to the city council (unless you count Dapper O'Neil, but he was always an at-large councilor). We also have a fairly large gay/lesbian community, which I'm betting Southie doesn't - and as far as I know, nobody has ever been barred from the Roslindale Day Parade, which is also run by a private group.

By eeka on Thu, 06/23/2005 - 9:00am.

I'm not in any way anti-Catholic, and I've never claimed to be. In the thread to which you're referring, I expressed irritation at specific former Catholic neighbors of mine who thought it was appropriate to tell me every time they saw me that I needed to find a mass to go to. Do you not see how it's offensive for someone to tell a Jew over and over to start going to mass when I've made it clear that I'm a member of a different religion?