Saint Patrick’s Day is always complicated for City Council speaker Christine Quinn. She’s plenty Irish, but she’s also gay, and so officially unwelcome at the city’s requisite Saint Pat’s political event, the parade down Fifth Avenue.In past years Quinn has gone as far as Dublin on March 17; last year, like most of the state’s pols, she found herself in Albany, at the emergency swearing-in of Governor David Paterson. Her parade boycott tomorrow will be a whole lot more fun: Quinn is one of the very few New York electeds who has been invited to President Barack Obama’s White House Saint Patrick’s Day party. There won’t be much green beer, but it’s a nice little political reward.However,this year,Christine C. Quinn will once again be celebrating St. Patrick's Day away from home. The New York Times reports:
After all, when Ms. Quinn, an openly gay Irish American, became speaker in 2006, the organizers of the city's signature St. Patrick's Day Parade, down Fifth Avenue, made it clear that while she could march as an individual and as a city official, she could not display anything hinting at gay pride -- not a pin, not a button, not a sash. So she boycotted the event.
"I just don't understand why being stuck is more attractive than even trying," Quinn told the paper. "It just seems hard to accept, with all of the progress in our city, and all of the progress in the world, that we should be at loggerheads over the inclusiveness of the Fifth Avenue parade. It kind of boggles the mind."
In 2007, Quinn attended the St. Patrick's Day Parade in Dublin, which she says "has always been inclusive."
This year Quinn is going to Washington, where she will attend reception for Irish-Americans at the White House featuring Prime Minister Brian Cowen of Ireland.
The group behind the parade, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, has a long historyof excluding gay people. In 1991 they tried to keep a gay organization out the parade and expelled the division that invited them.
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