Q Toon: St. Patrick's Day Off

Nearly every March for years and years, I've drawn something about St. Patrick's Day parades, always about the one in New York. I'm happy to announce that this year, I'm doing something different.

Q Syndicate✥Mar 5, 2015

Immaculate Heart of Mary School, a small Catholic school in Harvard, Massachusetts, has announced that it is canceling its participation in Boston's St. Patrick's Day parade because parade organizers, the Allied War Veterans' Council, are permitting OutVets, an organization of LGBT military veterans, to march.

"We can't associate with that,” Brother Thomas Dalton, principal of Immaculate Heart of Mary School, said in a phone interview. "It would appear we were condoning it."

In the past, parade organizers have excluded LGBT groups from the parade, citing antigay Catholic religious dogma; but last year, the beer companies who are the major sponsors of the parade withdrew their support because of the policy.

The thing that gets me about Brother Dalton is that it's not as if his marching band is being required to follow directly after RuPaul's Drag Race, Topless Dykes on Bikes, Twinks Wearing Little More Than Glitter, or 50 Shades of Latex. It's a veterans' group, fer crying out loud -- men and women who have served our country and lived to tell about it -- who might not even have staged anywhere near the Immaculate Mary Marching Band for all we know.

Given the 100" (2.5 m) of snow Boston is dealing with this winter, one wonders how organizers plan to march anyone down the snowbound streets of Southie anyway. One imagines spectators clinging to the tops of plow berms high above the parade as it is forced to march no more than three abreast down the constricted streets.

They might have to postpone the parade until Mothers' Day.