Gay rights politics get in the way of St. Patrick’s Day parades

St. Patrick’s Day festivities were in full swing Sunday with the usual merriment of bagpipes and beer, but political tensions lingered in the northeastern United States, where city leaders will be conspicuously absent from parades over gay rights issues.

New York’s Bill de Blasio (D) will become the first mayor in decades to sit out the traditional march Monday because parade organizers refuse to let participants carry pro-gay signs. Boston Mayor Martin Walsh (D) wasn’t marching in his city’s parade Sunday, either, after talks broke down that would have allowed a gay group to take part.

Still, thousands of green-clad spectators came out for the parade in Boston to watch bagpipers, and organizers of a float intended to promote diversity threw Mardi Gras-type beads at onlookers. A similar scene played out in downtown Philadelphia.

In Georgia, the dome of Savannah’s City Hall will be lit green, and several thousand people braved temperatures in the teens Sunday to march with pipe and drum bands in Detroit and Bay City, Mich.

Ireland’s head of government, Enda Kenny, became the first Irish prime minister to attend Boston’s annual St. Patrick’s Day breakfast Sunday.

But he has resisted pressure to support the gay rights lobby’s demand to have equal rights to parade on St. Patrick’s Day and he planned to march Monday in New York.

“The St. Patrick’s Day parade [in New York] is a parade about our Irishness and not about sexuality, and I would be happy to participate in it,” he said in Dublin before leaving for a six-day trip to the United States. WashingtonPost

Parade organizers have said that gay groups can march but are not allowed to carry gay-friendly signs or identify themselves as LGBT.