Tags

NYC St. Patrick’s Day Parade Bans Gays From Marching

Posted by on Mar 7, 2011 in Separation of Church & Prostate | 1 comment

Organizers claim nobody was excluded, yet there are photos of gays in green and rainbows being swarmed by police.

An LGBT group seeking to walk in New York’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade was initially given permission to march in the annual festival with one hell of a condition: The group was forbidden from wearing any signage denoting they were gay. This alone would be enough to ruffle feathers. But it gets worse.

NYC Council Speaker Christine Quinn, an Irish American lesbian, said that the invitation to join the march was eventually rescinded altogether. Quinn decided to boycott the parade in protest, but gays and lesbians who didn’t receive the message showed up to march and were assaulted.

New York Daily News reports:

“They tried to take us out,” said Dominick DeRubbio, 25, of the Young Democrats of Richmond County. He said that parade organizers and police swarmed the group – which includes both gay and straight members – when it started marching wearing rainbow pins and other symbols of the gay pride movement.

“He grabbed my jacket and tried to rip the [rainbow] ribbon off of me,” St. Jermaine Endeley, 20, said of his confrontation with a parade official. “It’s not fair. This is America. I can wear what I want.”

Organizers claim no group was excluded from the parade, and yet here we have a widely publicized case of a group being excluded. Insiders say the problem stemmed from an LGBT-friendly banner that was at odds with the Catholic Church. Um, this gay blog says the problem stems from homophobia and wackass discrimination.

Unacceptable! Absolutely unacceptable.

Are you disappointed to see gays and lesbians being discriminated against in New York City, of all places?

Via NY Daily News