irish queers protestThe New York City St. Patrick’s Day Parade is touted as the oldest and largest parade in the world. It boasts a quarter of a million marchers. The tradition was started 253 years ago and in 1891 the Ancient Order of Hibernians began the ritual march up 5th avenue, the same route used to this day. The parade has become the latest target of gay rights activists, who now single out the event for its alleged “homophobic” and “bigoted” stance on homosexuals. The parade organizers have been steadfast for over twenty years in refusing to allow gay rights crusaders to march under banners proclaiming gay pride. Of course, self-proclaimed homosexuals are welcome to march in the parade just as anyone else is, but the reason for the parade is a celebration of Irish Culture, not the advancement of the homosexual lifestyle.

Though New York declared years ago that the parade organizers’ policy is intolerant and exclusionary, this year the New York City council has refused to march in the parade and every subsequent parade unless the organizers change their policy. Even the city mayor, who calls himself Bill de Blasio, has refused to join the festivities. There is a particularly vociferous faction of the gay rights movement that calls itself the Irish Queers and they have called upon Mayor de Blasio to do more than just not attend the parade, but ban members of the NYPD and NYFD from marching in what they are calling an “explicitly anti-gay parade.” Is this kind of pathological coercion beginning to sound familiar?

We must expect this madness from New York City but it is shocking news that the Irish Brewer Guinness, a key sponsor of the St. Patrick’s Day parade, stated that they would not participate this year because “gay and lesbian groups had been excluded.” The Guinness Company continued to explain: “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that the policy of exclusion would be reversed for this year’s parade, as this has not come to pass, Guinness has withdrawn its participation.”

Guinness was one of my favorite beers until this morning.

What we have here is a failure to communicate! The issues boil down to a misuse of language and a public unaccustomed to hearing words linked to the thing they were originally intended to signify. Words have been divorced from their meanings and the gay rights groups have become adept at misusing language to further their agenda. One of their most effective crooked tropes is the intentional misuse of the word “equality.” In a distorted appeal to fairness, the word equal is contorted by the homosexualists to mean anything but true fairness and equality. The Irish Queers claim as “equal” so many false equivalents that we might have better luck untangling the Gordian knot than unraveling the yarn of their fabricated claims.

To begin the disentangling project, one of their bigger false equivalents is to claim that the gay rights movement is similar to a civil rights movement. It is not. The Irish Queers and their ilk are not striving for civil rights; they are simply trying to normalize a morally disordered lifestyle. The gay rights activists make the dreadful mistake of claiming they are what they do, but this is impossible. One is not what one does. All human souls are Imago Dei and irreducible. To try to reduce a human being to what he does is a criminal objectification of a precious, priceless and holy subject. The public at large seems completely unaware of the distinction between being and doing.

Responding to the news that gay rights activists are not allowed to march in the parades under their banner, Jeyashri Sridhar, 18, claimed, “It’s sad that people can’t participate because of who they are.” The truth is that they are welcomed to participate for who they are, but asked to refrain from using the parade as political platform to propagate the gay rights agenda.

The truth about the entire gay rights movement is that it assumes false rights. The Irish Queers are not asking for real rights, but for public sanction and approbation of morally disordered acts. It is not entirely unlike heterosexual sex addiction, and there are no real rights attending perversion of any kind. Authentic rights are connected with human persons and what is due them by justice and nature. The claimed rights to march in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade under a political banner do not exist; it is fabricated from whole cloth on pathological grounds.

When it comes to rights, equality, and fairness, do the Irish Queers apply a standard of tolerance equally? Do they return the tolerance they demand? Do they respect the right of a U.S. citizen to hold the position that homosexual acts are morally disordered? Ask them.

The accountants at Guinness propagate a similar semantic error when they claim they have a “strong history of supporting diversity and being an advocate for equality for all.” They don’t mean equality for all, they mean catering to the licentious demands of the gay rights campaigners most probably because many consumers are on board with the gay rights agenda and to agitate against their pathology might cost them money. Guinness’ move is purely motivated by the bottom line. Any pretense of goodness or truth is disingenuous.

We are imaginative conservatives and because we order our lives to the virtues, we can no sooner acquiesce to semantic errors and disordered morality asserted by the Irish Queers than we can remove our hearts from our chests. Same-sex attraction is a disordered inclination and becomes problematic for a community when an afflicted soul acts on those disordered inclinations.

As men of virtue we are opposed to any and all sex acts outside of marriage. We cannot promote such licentious disorder because by its very nature it damages all participants, both physically and psychologically. Sex acts outside of the marital bond are inherently selfish and require using another human for one’s own gratification with no real concern for the genuine wellbeing of the other. Ultimately, same-sex attractions, once acted upon, damage the individual, the family, and the community.

The St. Patrick’s Day Parade allows no political groups to carry signs, why on earth should the parade organizers be compelled to allow the Irish Queers to carry theirs? Why are special privileges to be granted to this tiny minority when they have utterly false premises and make such muddled claims? By falsely asserting that the St. Patrick’s Day event is an “explicitly anti-gay parade,” it is plain to see that the Irish Queers would sooner destroy the 253 year old tradition than give up their outrageous demands. This is an absurd moment in history, one that will echo tragically in the halls of our sons.  How long will we stand idly by while this once great civilization slips from our slackened grip?

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