Saint Patrick’s Day Reads

Top o’ the mornin’ to ya!

Like many places, New Orleans has been having St. Patrick’s Day parades and will have the traditional Irish Club Parade tonight!  There’s a big difference in many places this year.  Sponsors and politicians are pulling out in parades that will not open participation to gay groups.  Parades in Boston and New York are losing sponsors like Guiness, Samuel Adams and Heineken Beer.

Irish brewer Guinness said on Sunday that it would not participate in New York City’s St. Patrick’s Day parade this year because gay and lesbian groups had been excluded, costing organizers a key sponsor of the annual event.

The move came on the same day that Boston’s Irish-American mayor skipped that city’s St. Patrick’s Day parade after failing to hammer out a deal with organizers to allow a group of gay and lesbian activists to march openly.

“Guinness has a strong history of supporting diversity and being an advocate for equality for all. We were hopeful that the policy of exclusion would be reversed for this year’s parade,” the brewer said in a written statement issued by a spokesman for its parent company, Diageo.
“As this has not come to pass, Guinness has withdrawn its participation. We will continue to work with community leaders to ensure that future parades have an inclusionary policy,” Guinness said.

Last week New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said he would not march in the parade because gay and lesbian activists had been again precluded from taking part.

The loss of Guinness, one of the world’s top beer brands originating in Dublin, Ireland, appeared to ratchet up the pressure on organizers even further.

As noted, Boston’s Mayor also declined to participate in one of the city’s signature events that usually attracts the state and city’s major political leaders.

After weeks of discussions that failed to convince organizers of South Boston’s annual St. Patrick’s Day parade to let gays march openly in the parade, Mayor Martin J. Walsh said today he would not take part in the event.

Walsh said he was “disappointed” and felt a “little bit of frustration.”

“I think for the most part everyone was on the same page. We had an agreement. Everything was all set. It came down to what letters were on a banner, which was very unfortunate,” said Walsh, referring to a proposed banner bearing the letters “LGBTQ” on it.

For two decades, gay men and lesbians have been excluded from openly marching. Walsh worked until the last minute to bring the statewide gay rights organization MassEquality and parade organizers from the Allied War Veterans Council to an agreement that would have changed that.

The talks broke down over a matter of language: Parade organizers would not permit any signs or clothing bearing the word “gay” or any other declaration of sexual orientation. MassEquality would not march without those words, comparing the restriction to a return to the “closet” of concealing one’s identity.

Walsh said today that the issue “came down to five letters” on the LGBTQ [standing for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer] banner.

In a statement this morning praising Walsh for his efforts and for choosing not to march, Kara Coredini, executive director of MassEquality, said such a restriction was unfair.

“No other group is asked to march without a banner and their standard – not the police, firefighters, or the Irish,” Coredini said. “A double standard is the status quo and does not represent progress.”

Early Irish immigrants had to fight for their humanity and for respect.  It seems odd that a persecuted group would embrace such obvious bigotry.  How did the politics of Tip O’Neill’s Irish Americans move to the politics of Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly?

As late as the 19th century, Anglo elites in New York perceived the drunken and disorderly Irish newcomers as an unhealthful influence on the city’s industrious and long-settled black population.

But Irish-Americans rapidly absorbed the lesson that the way to succeed in their new country was to reject the politics of class and shared economic interests and embrace the politics of race. One disgraceful result was the New York draft riots of 1863, the low point of Irish-black relations in American history, when Irish immigrants by the thousands turned on their black neighbors in a thinly disguised race riot. Irish-Americans were under no delusions that the ruling class of Anglo Protestants liked or trusted them, and anti-Irish and/or anti-Catholic bigotry endured in diluted form well into the 20th century. But by allying themselves with a system of white supremacy, the Irish in America were granted a share of power and privilege — most notably in urban machine politics, and the police and fire departments of every major city.

As Joan’s book and many other sources have discussed, over the course of the last century the bulk of the Irish-American population drifted rightward through the Democratic Party and then out the other side into Archie Bunker-land. A key constituency of the New Deal coalition became, 40 years later, a key constituency of the Reagan revolution. But throughout that period there was always a countervailing social-justice tendency in Irish-American life, the tendency of the antiwar activist brothers Daniel and Philip Berrigan (quite likely the only Jesuit priests ever to make the FBI’s most-wanted list), or of 1952 left-wing presidential candidate Vincent Hallinan and his firebrand San Francisco family. This was the tradition of the radical Vatican II priests, nuns and theologians, who kept many of us from abandoning the Church altogether, and of the 1968 reawakening of Robert F. Kennedy and the subsequent career of his brother Teddy.

Without exception, those people started from an understanding of their own cultural and national history. They began with Irish nationalist or republican politics, and moved from there to consider how Ireland’s story fit into a worldwide pattern that transcended the specific racial paranoia of the United States. Of course Irish history did not end in 1998, and the current situation in that country – a land of immigrants for the first time in its modern history – is exceptionally interesting. But Ireland is no longer a divisive and charismatic “issue,” capable of galvanizing people who live thousands of miles away. With Irish-American identity now split between an optional lifestyle accessory and a bunch of unappealing right-wing guys yelling at us, its social-justice component has evaporated as well.

Can you imagine what Tip O’Neill would say to the likes of Paul Ryan?

 Paul Ryan: When I said ‘inner city’ men are too lazy to work; that’s their ‘culture,’ I didn’t mean it racially.

It seems that now that poverty is spreading to white people, the topic has piqued the interest of a handful of Republican leaders. Notably, Republican bullshit artist par excellence, Paul Ryan, who has lately been trying to convince the public that he really cares and is earnestly searching his ample intellect for a solution — as long as it doesn’t require any government spending. Whoever is buying what he’s selling is dumber than a post.

So here is this deep thinker’s take on the cause of poverty: laziness. And not just any kind of laziness, the dreaded “culture” of “inner city” laziness. Or, in the House Budget Committee Chairman, ex-GOP veep candidate’s words:

“We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.”

You don’t have to be a genius at cracking codes to understand that he’s simply saying: Blacks are lazy. They prefer being poor to working. (As if working was a surefire way not to be poor.)

When called out on the thinly-veiled racism of his comments, Ryan said he had been “inarticulate” and had not intended to be racist at all. In fact, it never even occurred to him that they might be racist.

And if that isn’t the mark of a racist we don’t know what is. Surely, Ryan, with that big intellect of his, knows that the libertarian so-called-thinker he has lately been quoting, Charles Murray, who argues that Blacks and Latinos are genetically inferior, is also a self-described white Nationalist.

Note to Ryan: White Nationalist = racist!

To read more about how toxic Murray is and what a complete fraud Ryan is, click here: 

So, that’s my offerings this morning.  I may try to get a second post up later because I’ve been finding some interesting items up about what incredible things are going on in this country with the huge income gaps between the wealthy and every one else.

What’s on you reading and blogging list today?