Throughout this past week, there has been some buzz about Christine Quinn, the lesbian City Council speaker’s boycott of the St. Patrick’s Day parade. Since 1991 when people were first banned from displaying banners, t-shirts or any other items to distinguish parade participants as gay, this issue has received little media attention. So, some good has already come of Quinn’s leadership. In the Metro Section, the NY Times gave the issue a couple of inches. But what actually got the most attention was that John Dunleavy, the chairman of the parade compared “gay activists” to the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis in The Irish Voice.

Dunleavy said, "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?"

Obviously many people failed to see this comparison as something a sane person would make. How is a gay Irish person who wants to show pride in both of these facets of his/her life the same as someone who hates and wants to kill hetero Irish people? This was scandalous enough to make it into the Times, USA Today, Newsday and the New York Sun picked up the same AP story, and I believe NPR mentioned it. Nonetheless, it’s barely been made an issue that Bloomberg who says he believes that anyone should be able to march, went right along and marched without any solid denunciation of this open bigotry.

In the Times piece, Winnie Hu writes, “Mr. Dunleavy added that Irish-Americans take part in the parade mainly to honor their heritage, not their "lifestyle.”” Here we go again with the “lifestyle” thing. Yes, LGBTQ people wash their gay dishes with their gay soap while listening to their gay music. “Lifestyle” is a loaded word used to generalize and discriminate. It makes LGBTQ people the “other’ and connotes a separate way of living. Luckily Hu put this word in quotes so we know it’s not the paper’s terminology, but really, someone's has to put an end to the "lifestyle" classification.