February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
By Ray O’Hanlon and Harry Keaney
The Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization is this week vowing its biggest ever St. Patrick’s Day protest in a decade after its attempt to sue New York City and its police department collapsed in a federal court last week.
“It was the worst possible decision,” ILGO spokeswoman Anne Maguire said after a federal jury rejected ILGO’s allegation that it was being denied its constitutional rights by the city.
The decision also appears to have upped the ante for First Lady and U.S. Senate candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton. There is a widespread expectation that Clinton will take part in the parade but boycotts by fellow Democrats are certain to occur as a result of ILGO’s continued exclusion.
Attorneys for ILGO had argued during the two week trial, in Federal court in lower Manhattan, that the city’s repeated denial of a permit to ILGO was in breach of the group’s free speech rights under the First Amendment. Attorney Virginia Waters, representing the city, responded that neither the city nor the jury could make it possible for ILGO to march in what was a Hibernian parade.
ILGO wants the permit in order to protest its exclusion from the New York St. Patrick’s Day Parade on the route of the parade, Fifth Avenue, and at a time when its protest would be witnessed by people gathered to watch the parade.
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But after lengthy closing arguments by lawyers for the city, the Ancient Order of Hibernians and ILGO in court last Wednesday morning, the seven men and two women on the jury may well have remembered best the words of AOH attorney Ernest Mathews.
Borrowing a line from a well known Billy Joel song, Mathews told the jury that while the parade organizers conceded ILGO’s right to free speech in a broad sense, the issue in court boiled down to a case of “say what you want but not on my time.”
Jurors indicated after their decision that the rejection of ILGO’s argument was based on a legal instruction by the presiding judge, John Koeltl, which apparently reflected that songline.
Judge Koeltl had told the jury before it began deliberating that ILGO did not necessarily have a constitutional right to deliver its message to people gathered along the parade route to watch the parade.
ILGO’s reaction
ILGO, in a statement following the verdict, said it was “surprised and saddened” by the decision.
“In denying the protest permit, and in subsequently defending that action, the City of New York under Mayor Giuliani’s administration has exhibited not only intolerance and a large degree of ignorance about the gay community, but also a good deal of outright hatred.”
The case had been returned to U.S. District Court — which had initially rejected a hearing — by the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Asked if ILGO now planned to appeal the verdict to the Second Circuit court, Anne Maguire said that ILGO members had not discussed a possible appeal yet but at the same time she felt that such a move was unlikely.
Maguire indicated that ILGO’s energies would most likely be focused in the coming days on its planned protest on Fifth Avenue before this year’s parade, which takes place on Friday, March 17.
She said that as many as 2,000 ILGO members and allies of the group would be gathering on 59th St. and Fifth Avenue at 9 .30 a.m.
“It will be a way, way bigger crowd than in other years,” Maguire said.
ILGO has been protesting the parade’s refusal to allow the group march under its own banner for ten years. In 1992, ILGO was permitted to assemble at 59th St. for a ten block protest march an hour before the parade and on part of the parade route. But since 1993, the group has been barred from the parade route and has staged its protests outside the Public Library on 42nd St. just south of the route’s beginning.