{"id":336,"date":"2009-03-16T18:14:21","date_gmt":"2009-03-16T18:14:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2009\/03\/christine-quinn-not-irish-enou.html"},"modified":"2009-03-16T18:14:21","modified_gmt":"2009-03-16T18:14:21","slug":"christine-quinn-not-irish-enou","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/03\/christine-quinn-not-irish-enou.html","title":{"rendered":"Christine Quinn: Not Irish enough–or too gay?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\"Christine<\/span>The speaker of the New York City Council, a pretty powerful and savvy lass, is also about as Irish as they come. But she’s openly gay, too. Which means she can’t march in New York’s annual March 17 Eire-extravaganza up Fifth Avenue and past Cardinal Edward Egan standing on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Yes, divorced, pro-choice, pro gay rights and Italian-American Rudy Giuliani was welcome. But alas, not Christine Quinn. <\/p>\n

The New York Times’ City Room reports<\/a>: <\/p>\n

\n

Ms. Quinn — the 2008 recipient of the Irish American of the Year award from the Irish Echo, the oldest and largest Irish-American newspaper — said in an interview that she was honored. But she also said that she felt a bit of “sadness” that she also wouldn’t be able to celebrate on Fifth Avenue, alongside the estimated 150,000 people who march every year either. <\/p>\n

Sure, she asked the parade’s organizers, the New York City St. Patrick’s Parade and Celebration Committee, to sit down and have a meeting to discuss possible compromises — as she has done for years. And once again, she said that she did not get a response. <\/p>\n

“I just don’t understand why being stuck is more attractive than even trying,” she said. “It just seems hard to accept, with all of the progress in our city, and all of the progress in the world, that we should be at loggerheads over the inclusiveness of the Fifth Avenue parade. It kind of boggles the mind.” <\/p>\n

A message left with the parade organizers was not immediately returned.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

As the story notes, Quinn has been hailed by much of the Irish-American community, and something tells me this isn’t a play by the Cathedral crowd, either. Edward Egan never liked to pick fights with public figures, no matter how controversial, and I don’t think he’d give a hoot if Quinn marched–even if she was with her partner, as shown in this photo of her, at right, marching in the 2007 St. Patrick’s Day parade in Dublin with Kim Catullo. <\/p>\n

(When Quinn became council speaker in 2006 parade organizers said she could march–as long as she wore nothing and did nothing to indicate she was gay. She, um, declined.) <\/p>\n

Yes, the Irish–that is, the church-going folks who live in Ireland–are a lot less torn up about this sort of thing than the provincials organizing the New York parade. Indeed, to make the story even more rich, this year Quinn will be attending a reception for Irish-Americans at the White House Tuesday night hosted by President Obama, and featuring Prime Minister Brian Cowen of Ireland. Sweet. <\/p>\n

The Irish…They say all their wars are merry and their songs are sad. This battle is definitely not a happy one. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The speaker of the New York City Council, a pretty powerful and savvy lass, is also about as Irish as they come. But she’s openly gay, too. Which means she can’t march in New York’s annual March 17 Eire-extravaganza up Fifth Avenue and past Cardinal Edward Egan standing on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Yes, divorced,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,2,6,7,3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-336","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bishops","category-catholic","category-church","category-history","category-politics","category-pop-culture"],"yoast_head":"\nChristine Quinn: Not Irish enough-or too gay? - Pontifications<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/03\/christine-quinn-not-irish-enou.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Christine Quinn: Not Irish enough-or too gay? - Pontifications\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The speaker of the New York City Council, a pretty powerful and savvy lass, is also about as Irish as they come. 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=336"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}