I heard this on the radio this morning while I was getting dressed (registration required for link).
John Dunleavy, the parade chairman, touched off a new controversy by comparing Irish gay activists to neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. In an interview yesterday in The Irish Times, Mr. Dunleavy was quoted as saying, “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?”
To understand how mad this made me, understand that I heard it, then got dressed, made coffee, drove to work, drank more coffee, and then was still mad enough to look it up to post it.
Because obviously, Irish gays and lesbians in an Irish parade are just like the KKK in an African-American parade. They have the same murderous intent, the same hatred, the same violent criminal history.
/sarcasm
I didn’t realize that when I faced the fact that I was gay, it meant I had to renounce my Irish heritage.
Does my mom have to renounce her Irish heritage too since she’s supportive of her two gay sons?
This is a weird second-order variation on a familiar meme. The Catholic League (in the person of the thoroughly odious William Donohue) has likened the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence to Nazis dressing up as rabbis to mock Jews. It’s completely Orwellian oppressor-as-victim stuff (in reality, the Sisters are more analogous to Jews mocking Nazis), but it does at least have a certain twisted logic to it (there is, in fact, mockery of the church going on). This Dunleavy character appears to have borrowed Donohue’s analogy and applied it to a situation where it makes even less sense than it did in the first place.
Does my mom have to renounce her Irish heritage too since she’s supportive of her two gay sons?
Yes. Would you like to be Jewish? We eat better anyway.
I thought you might like seeing how some people are speaking out about this stupidity.
It sounds to me that Mr.Dunleavy would feel right at home with the K.K.K.