For the first time in two decades, the city’s mayor will boycott New York’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade, which dates to 1762 and is among the world’s oldest civilian parades.
Bill de Blasio says he’ll skip the annual march up Fifth Avenue, citing “the exclusion of some individuals” by parade organizers. By this, he means gay organizations.
The mayor is certainly within his rights to choose where and when he will march. And we’re glad to see that he at least refused to cave in to demands that he bar uniformed city workers, primarily police and firefighters, from marching themselves.
Still, his reasoning is disingenuous: Gays and lesbians are not excluded from marching in the St. Paddy’s Day parade. They are prohibited only from marching with a banner and signs identifying them as gay.
That, organizers say, runs counter to the message of the parade, which commemorates the saint who brought Christianity to Ireland and the Irish contribution to America. And here the organizers are backed by a unanimous 1995 US Supreme Court decision on Boston’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade.
In this case, the justices — including such liberals as Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer — ruled that those who run a private parade, even on public property, have the First Amendment right to present their message in the way they see fit.
That right applies equally to gays, too, and their own march along Fifth Avenue: Organizers of the Pride Parade would be within their right to exclude, say, a church that wanted to march under a banner expressing opposition to same-sex marriage.
The St. Patrick’s Day parade is one of this city’s oldest and most-beloved traditions. We don’t see why it must be dragged into a debate over the politics of sexual identity. Mayors as different as Mike McBloomberg and Ed O’Koch have found the Irish in them and marched. We hope Mayor de Blasio will, too.