For Irish L.G.B.T.Q. New Yorkers, It’s Been a Long Way to Staten Island

— Activists like Brendan Fay have campaigned for decades to make St. Patrick’s Day festivities open to L.G.B.T.Q. groups. A new parade in Staten Island on Sunday is their final achievement.

Brendan Fay, left, has fought for more inclusive St. Patrick’s Day parades for decades. His husband, Tom Moulton, right, readied the sash Mr. Fay planned to wear to the Staten Island parade this Sunday.

By Liam Stack

This year, for the first time, every New York City borough will host a St. Patrick’s Day Parade that allows L.G.B.T.Q. groups, bringing a decades-long conflict to an end.

That milestone will be celebrated on Sunday with a new parade on Staten Island, part of a deal brokered by Mayor Eric Adams. It’s the result of decades of work by activists like Brendan Fay, an indefatigable Irish immigrant who began lobbying for the inclusion of gay marchers 34 years ago.

“There has been a huge cultural transformation that I have lived through from 1990 until today,” Mr. Fay, 65, said this week as he prepared to march in the Staten Island parade.

Still, he said, “we had no idea it would take so long.”

The new parade quickly overshadowed the borough’s traditional march, held on March 3, which officials said they believed to be the only one left in the United States that bans gay marchers. Most of New York’s elected officials, who plan to march on Sunday, have boycotted the borough’s original parade for years.

The organizers of the original parade, a private group, could not be reached for comment, but they have previously stated that they did not want the parade to contradict teachings of the Catholic Church or be used to promote “political or sexual identification agendas.”

In 2018, Larry Cummings, the main organizer of the parade, told The Irish Voice, a diaspora newspaper in New York City, “Our parade is for Irish heritage and culture.”

When Mr. Fay moved to the United States from Ireland in 1984, few if any St. Patrick’s Day parades welcomed L.G.B.T.Q. organizations. Mr. Fay was a Catholic school religion teacher, and had thought he would spend his life working for the church.

But in 1991, Mr. Fay joined a group of gay marchers in Manhattan whose inclusion in the Fifth Avenue parade had been negotiated by the mayor at the time, David Dinkins. It went very badly: Both the mayor and the marchers were booed for more than 40 blocks, and they were pelted with beer bottles and slurs. Some spectators chanted “AIDS!” as they passed.

After the parade, Mr. Dinkins likened it to “marching in Birmingham, Alabama,” during the civil rights movement. Gay groups were banned from the parade the next year on the grounds that their presence was inappropriate for a celebration of a Catholic saint.

In a black-and-white photo, Brendan Fay, wearing a dark vest and white jeans, holds hands with two others as they twirl in a circle. Beyond them are police barriers and people marching in a parade.
Brendan Fay, center, dances to Irish music as he protests the exclusion of gay people from Staten Island’s parade in 1993.

Following news coverage of the event, Mr. Fay was fired from his job, which imperiled his visa status. But he soon began working at the Metropolitan Community Church, a gay church in Midtown, and turned his life to activism on behalf of AIDS patients, L.G.B.T.Q. people and immigrants.

“I come out of a spirit of Catholic social justice activism,” he said. “People say, ‘When did you become an activist?’ And it goes back to nuns and priests and committed lay people in Ireland, protesting for the people of El Salvador and against apartheid.”

But the St. Patrick’s Day Parade always loomed large, not just as a street festival but as a symbol for something more.

“At the heart of the parade issue is a deeper issue of human belonging,” Mr. Fay said. Exclusion from the parade mirrored the silences that we lived with most of our lives — the wonder if you could safely hold hands on your neighborhood street, if you could be yourself at your place of employment or with your family.”

While gay activists fought for decades to be included in St. Patrick’s Day celebrations in the United States, their participation in events in Ireland was largely uncontroversial. And as Irish America became more politically conservative, Ireland was moving rapidly in the opposite direction.

In 2015, the year the New York City parade first allowed gay marchers, Ireland became the first country in the world to enact same-sex marriage by popular vote.

The next year, Mr. Fay was given an award for his activism by Michael D. Higgins, the president of Ireland. In 2017, he was invited to Ireland to be the grand marshal of the parade in Drogheda, “the town I fled from in 1984,” he said. And months later, a 38-year-old biracial gay man, Leo Varadkar, became Ireland’s prime minister.

Throughout the 1990s, Mr. Fay worked with the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization, and then formed his own group, the Lavender and Green Alliance, in 1994, to lobby for gay inclusion in the city’s main parade on Fifth Avenue and in smaller parades in the other boroughs.

Mr. Fay and other protesters were arrested so many times that when police officers saw him at a parade, “they would sometimes ask me if I was going to be their guest for another St. Patrick’s Day,” he said.

The tipping point came in 1999. Mr. Fay was arrested three times: at the Fifth Avenue parade, at the Bronx parade and at the Brooklyn parade. After years of campaigning, the activists had little to show for it except an arrest record.

A group of men wearing white and green sashes, including Brendan Fay, who has a goatee, are crowded into a light blue van by police officers.
In 1999, members of the Lavender and Green Alliance, including Brendan Fay, center, were arrested after attempting to march in a St. Patricks Day parade in Brooklyn.

And then Mr. Fay had an idea: Why not throw their own parade?

Working with friends in Queens, he cobbled together St. Pat’s for All, an event with a homespun spirit that began in 2000.

“When we were doing the parade we asked, ‘What does it mean to be Irish?’” he said.

Their answer to that question was a parade where local parish groups and Irish drag queens would march beside N.A.A.C.P. members holding banners about Frederick Douglass’s travels to 19th-century Ireland.

But St. Pat’s for All became a sensation even before its very first bagpipe blared because of a surprising phone call Mr. Fay received from the White House. It was an aide to Hillary Clinton, who at the time was preparing to run for the United States Senate from New York.

She wanted to march in this new parade she had heard was coming to Queens. Could Mr. Fay accommodate that?

“They asked me about the stage and the sound system and all of that, and we had none of it planned,” Mr. Fay said. “But she came in March 2000, and the media came, and that was that.”

St. Pat’s for All is still held every year in Sunnyside and Woodside, but its spirit has now spread to almost every parade in the New York area.

And as Mr. Fay marches on Sunday in Staten Island, the last borough to extend a welcome to all, he will be thinking of friends and parade fixtures who did not live long enough to see this day: Father Mychal Judge, who died in the Sept. 11 attacks; the activist Tarlach MacNiallais, who died of coronavirus in 2020; and the author Malachy McCourt, who died on Monday at age 92.

“I don’t take anything for granted — L.G.B.T. people take nothing for granted when it comes to being welcomed as part of your community,” he said. “I never thought, of course, that a parade would become so much of my life, but it did.”

Complete Article HERE!

Majority of Hispanic Catholics Support Same-Sex Marriage, a New Study Reveals

— While religion and sexuality have long been a clashing issue, a new study now reveals shifting patterns in such values and attitudes across the U.S.

About 20% of those who identify as LGBTQ are also Hispanic, according to a new study.

By

Sexuality among religious Latinos has long been a complex subject. While the place of same-sex marriage among major traditional religions has been contested over decades, a new survey shows that a number of religious Latino groups in the U.S., including Hispanic Catholics, support same-sex marriage and believe it should be allowed.

The study was conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, or PRRI, throughout 2023. With more than 22,000 adults interviewed, the institute seeks to form a detailed profile of the demographic, religious and political characteristics of LGBTQ Americans.

The analysis measures Americans’ attitudes on LGTQ rights across all 50 states on three key politics: nondiscrimination protections, religiously based services refusals and same-sex marriage.

The study comes at a contrasting time for Latino religious followers.

On one hand, Latino evangelical support for Christian nationalism is on the rise, with about 55% of Hispanic Protestants saying they supported or sympathized with the movement in 2023, a 12% increase compared to the year prior, NBC News reports.

“I believe that God is going to do something very great with the Latino people in the United States,” Pastor Dionny Baez told his protestant congregation in Miami.

On the other hand, the share of Latinos who are religiously unaffiliated (describing themselves as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular”) now stands at 30%, up from 18% in 2013.

Pope Francis presides over the Christmas Eve mass at St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican on December 24, 2023
Pope Francis formally approved letting Catholic priests bless same-sex couples back in December.

But when it comes to sexuality, the Hispanic profile in relation to religion and sexuality becomes more nuanced, according to PRRI.

In the U.S., roughly one in ten Americans identified as part of the LGBTQ community. Of this number, one in five are Hispanic (20%) the second largest race in the country to identify as part of this community.

Despite these numbers, support for LGBTQ people varied widely depending on the religion.

The lowest levels of support for nondiscrimination protections are from Hispanic Protestants (61%), followed by white evangelical Protestants and Muslims (56%).

Hispanic Catholics generally support such laws, but they saw one of the most dramatic declines between 2022 and 2023, decreasing 8 points (from 83% to 75%).

When it comes to same-sex marriage, a similar pattern emerges. While strong majorities of Christian nationalism Rejecters and Skeptics are in favor of allowing gay and lesbian couples the right to marry legally, most of those who are sympathizers and adherents of the movement oppose it.

89% of Hispanic Christian nationalism Rejecters favor same-sex marriage, followed by 70% of Hispanic Christian nationalism Skeptics who think similarly.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, 55% of Hispanic Christian nationalism sympathizers oppose allowing same-sex marriage, compared to 75% of adherents who think the same.

Catholics have long opposed same-sex marriage, but lately there have been factions seeking to present a more open stance. One of them is spearheaded by none other than Pope Francis, who back in December formally approved letting Catholic priests bless same-sex couples under certain circumstances.

While the Pope stressed that blessings in question must not be tied to any specific Catholic celebration or religious service and should not be conferred at the same time as a civil union ceremony, he also requested for such blessings to not be denied, insisting that people seeking a relationship with God and looking for his mercy shouldn’t be hold up to an impossible standard to receive it.

“There is no intention to legitimize anything, but rather to open one’s life to God, to ask for his help to live better, and also to invoke the Holy Spirit so that the values of the Gospel may be lived with greater faithfulness,” he said.

Complete Article HERE!

Banned priest Tony Flannery to break silence on fate of the Catholic Church

Fr Tony Flattery has been unable to celebrate mass publicly since his faculties were revoked in a Vatican crackdown on liberal views.

By Lorna Siggins

Banned Redemptorist priest Tony Flannery plans to question the survival of the Roman Catholic church at a public talk in Galway shortly before Easter Sunday.

Fr Flannery (77), who was suspended from public ministry by the Vatican in 2012, intends to give his views on whether “religious belief as we have known it can survive in modern Ireland”.

He also intends to pay tribute to Pope Francis for “freeing up discussion, areas of study and the search for the truth”.

The Redemptorist priest had been disciplined in 2012 for publicly expressing support for women’s ordination and same-sex marriage, and for expressing more liberal views on homosexuality.

Although he has been outspoken since his suspension and was profiled in a recent TG4 documentary, he has not given a public talk with a question and answer session in six years.

He says the talk he intends to give in the Clayton Hotel, Galway on March 27 was scheduled to be given in church property several months ago.

However, when the organisers learned that the ban imposed on him applied not only to speaking in churches but to speaking in “all church-owned property”, a new venue had to be found.

Fr Flannery says that in spite of his suspension, he has “studied and read” and has been contemplating “how best to address the falling attendances at Mass” and “the falling away in general from the Catholic faith”.

“If we take the traditional indications of the health of the faith as measured by the Catholic Church… then all the signs are that it is in serious trouble, and that the faith is in the terminal stage of ill health,” he says.

“Churches are emptying or are being frequented only by the older generation,” he says, noting that “seminaries are closing down, and priest numbers are declining rapidly”.

“There appear to be few, if any signs of new growth – but that is by no means the full story.

“We are living in a really interesting time in the [Catholic] church since the arrival of the papacy of Francis. Even in the 11 years since his appointment he has brought about a great deal of change,”he says.

“I have no doubt that the biggest legacy Pope Francis will leave from his time in charge is that he has freed up discussion, areas of study and the search for truth in the church – all of which had been seriously restricted for many centuries by rigid imposition of official teachings.

“The “pre-Francis” church had adopted the position that it had the full truth, and that it had nothing to learn from the world.

“Francis, on the other hand, realised that in order for the church to be relevant, it must engage with modern life, and be part of the debate about the future of the world and of people.”

He cites as examples of that attitude change “the extent to which Francis has engaged in the debate about the destruction of the environment and the necessity of facing up to climate change”.

Fr Flannery says all are welcome to his talk in Galway’s Clayton Hotel, Briarhill, on March 27, and will allow for a question and answer session.

Last year, the Association of Catholic Priests (ACP) and Lay Catholic Group (LCG) called for him to be restored to the ministry and said he had experienced a “grave injustice”.

Complete Article HERE!

Right-Winger Accuses Gay Dad of “Criminal Sexual Conduct”

— José Rolón is speaking out against a right-winger’s accusation that he is sexualizing his children by exposing them to LGBTQ culture.

José Rolón (left) – Photo: TikTok. Stew Peters – Video screenshot – StewPeters.com, via Instagram

By

José Rolón, who has 150,000 followers on Instagram and over 500,000 followers on TikTok under the user name @nycgaydad, found himself bombarded with threats from right-wing users after conservative commentator Stew Peters tagged him in an Instagram video.

In the video, Peters called Rolón a “creep” and a “pervert homo,” and called for his public execution. He also accused Rolón of “criminal sexual conduct,” tagging the New York Police Department and urging them to investigate the gay widower.

“Some pervert homo has access to at least four kids around the clock all the time,” Peters said, misstating the number of Rolón’s children. “He can take them to drag conventions and then post the evidence, post pictures and videos of criminal sexual conduct … and somehow not end up in jail, or better yet, the gallows.”

The video has since been removed from the platform.

The “sexual conduct” Peters appeared to be referring to is a post in which Rolón took his children to RuPaul’s Drag Con and bought what he thought were rainbow-colored bracelets, only to realize that they were in fact cock rings.

Rolón made a video about the incident, saying he was “mortified” by his mistake. He also claimed to have spoken with the vendor, who he said tried to warn him but didn’t know how, because his children were so excited by the “bracelets.”

Peters expressed outrage that “this homosexual” takes his children to drag shows and allows them to see “cross-dressing wigs” in his closet

He aired a clip from one of Rolón’s videos, in which the children joked that they have rainbows and disco balls over their house.

Rolón was horrified by Peters’ commentary. “I just couldn’t believe the things that were coming out of his mouth,” he told The Advocate. “He tagged the NYPD and requested for them to investigate me for not only sex crimes, but also [for me to] be met at the gallows. That, to me, is the line that was [most] shocking. … This man is actually calling for my hanging in public.”

Rolón began getting threats and was deluged with negative comments accusing him of “grooming” his children by exposing his children to LGBTQ content.

In an Instagram video, he accused Peters of spreading “misinformation,” and called him a “D-list version of Tucker Carlson.” “It’s people like you that are destroying this country,” he says in the post.

Rolón told The Advocate he struggled with the idea of speaking out against Peters, but felt he needed to respond publicly to ensure his own children’s safety and dispel misconceptions about gay parents.

“In our community, we’re often faced with this question of do we ignore it so that we don’t give this person a voice, or make it so that people are aware of the kind of people that are out there spreading misinformation about our community,” Rolón said. “I made the decision to talk about it because I think it’s important.”

While Peters blurred the faces of Rolón’s children in his Instagram clip, he did not do so in the full segment on Rumble, a video-hosting platform popular among conservatives.

The full video, which runs more than 50 minutes and targets LGBTQ parents as unfit to raise children, covers a significant amount of time criticizing Rolón’s parenting and shows his children’s faces, without safeguarding their identities.

Rolón told The Advocate he is seeking legal advice and weighing whether to take legal action against Peters and Rumble for not blurring his children’s faces in the longer video.

He also noted that he has had to take measures, including changing his schedule to ensure only he can pick up his children from school in order to protect them.

“My kids were initially allowed to self-dismiss from their school, and they are no longer able to self-dismiss,” Rolón said. “It’s forcing us to be a little bit more vigilant and just take extra precaution. These are the things that our community is constantly having to deal with.”

Complete Article HERE!

Victims of Catholic nuns rely on each other after being overlooked in the clergy sex abuse crisis

Gabrielle Longhi

By TIFFANY STANLEY

On Wednesdays, the support group meets over Zoom. The members talk about their lives, their religious families and their old parochial schools. But mostly, they are there to talk about the sexual abuse they suffered at the hands of Catholic nuns.

The topic deserves more attention, they say. The sexual abuse of children by Catholic sisters and nuns has been overshadowed by far more common reports of male clergy abuse. Women in religious orders have also been abuse victims — but they have been perpetrators too.

“We’ve heard so much about priests who abuse and so little about nuns who abuse that it’s time to restore the balance,” said the group’s founder, Mary Dispenza, herself a former nun, in a speech to abuse survivors last year.

Dispenza, who endured abuse from both a childhood priest and a nun in her former order, started the online support group five years ago with the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP. More victims had been contacting her in the wake of #MeToo, as they reassessed past sexual abuse. She has since seen a growing awareness of abusive nuns at former Catholic orphanages and Native American boarding schools.

“The general public would rather not consider the fact that religious women rape, molest and torture children,” Dispenza told The Associated Press. Women are seen as nurturers and caregivers, an assumption only heightened with the “spiritual halo” of religious women.

“It’s something most of us don’t want to entertain or really believe,” she said.

NEW LAW OFFERS CHANCE FOR JUSTICE

Before she found the support group and its 10 or so members, Gabrielle Longhi had spent years looking for someone with a story like hers, once posting in the comments of SNAP’s website: “I never hear about abuse by nuns.”

Now 66 and living in Los Angeles, Longhi was a sophomore at Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart in Bethesda, Maryland, when she alleges a teacher, who was then a Catholic sister with the Society of the Sacred Heart, sexually abused her in an office.

Unlike most child sexual abuse victims, she spoke up right away. She told other teachers, her sister and friends that Sister Margaret Daley had tried to sexually force herself on Longhi. Neither her parents nor the police were notified.

“She also kind of retreated after that. She became more closed down,” said her sister, Carol O’Leary, who was then a student at Stone Ridge’s middle school. The sisters say they were soon asked to leave Stone Ridge.

Longhi always wondered if there were other victims. Daley, her alleged abuser, left the order in 1980 and died in 2015.

Last year, Longhi learned from another support group member that Maryland was removing its civil statute of limitations for child sex abuse victims. After the new law went into effect, Longhi sued her former school and the religious order.

Stone Ridge, which has educated Kennedys and the daughters of other Washington luminaries, sent a letter to its community about the allegations last fall. The school declined to comment further on active litigation.

The Society of the Sacred Heart declined to discuss the allegations, but issued a statement saying the order and its schools have implemented robust child protection policies. “We are deeply saddened,” the statement read. “Our prayers go out to all involved in this matter, and to all survivors of sexual abuse.”

An anticipated constitutional challenge to Maryland’s law is pending, but the policy change “makes all the difference in the world,” Longhi said. “Before you have no case and now you do.”

‘IT WAS ABUSE. I INTERPRETED IT AS LOVE.’

Paige Eppenstein Anderson is still hoping for her day in court. Like many group members, it took her decades to see that what happened to her was abuse, and once she did in 2020 at age 40, the statute of limitations had run out on her claim in her home state of Pennsylvania.

“It was abuse. I interpreted it as love,” she said of the sexual relationship she had as a student with a Catholic school teacher, who later joined a religious order.

As a teenager, she spent much of her free time with her teacher. Their bond was so noticeable that a yearbook entry from a friend called her the woman’s “companion.”

“It was very confusing to me,” Eppenstein Anderson said.

Anne Gleeson was also nearly 40 and in therapy before she understood that she was sexually abused for years, starting at age 13, by a nun who was 24 years her senior. She received a settlement from the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet in 2004.

“The nun brainwashed me into thinking we were head over heels in love,” she said. “God’s love, that’s why no one else could know about it — it was so special.”

A longtime SNAP activist in St. Louis, Gleeson had felt that the advocacy group’s name — which only mentioned those abused by priests — neglected victims like her.

The nun abuse group brought “a great sense of relief,” she said.

LITTLE TRACKING OF ABUSIVE NUNS

Few dioceses or religious orders publicly list abusive nuns — a fact group members want to change. The advocacy group Bishop Accountability lists 172 Catholic sisters who have been accused of sex abuse.

“I feel that it’s vastly underreported,” said Marya Dantzer, a group member who settled her nun abuse case in Michigan in 1996.

Dantzer noted that nuns, especially as teachers, arguably spend more time with young people than priests.

For years, Dispenza and others have been asking without success for the Leadership Conference of Women Religious — which represents two-thirds of U.S. Catholic sisters — to allow nun abuse survivors to speak at their annual meeting.

“We agree with SNAP that women religious need to keep working for the healing of victims and the prevention of further abuse and that hearing directly from survivors is essential,” said Sister Annmarie Sanders, LCWR spokesperson, in an email.

Sanders said the LCWR meeting was not “the proper venue for discussion on this issue.” Victims should instead contact their abuser’s religious order.

Each of the more than 400 U.S. religious institutes for women is relatively autonomous.

In a 2019 speech about Catholic sex abuse, LCWR’s then-president Sharlet Wagner acknowledged “that in some instances, our own sisters have been perpetrators of the abuse.”

That speech followed an apology for abuse from an international organization of Catholic sisters, as well as Pope Francis’ creation of an abuse reporting system, which includes nuns.

The support group members would like the church to accept more responsibility, and for all religious orders to expel known abusers from their ranks.

In the meantime, the support group continues to welcome new members, even as others move on. It remains mostly women, many over age 60.

Dispenza recently stepped back from facilitating the group, with Dantzer taking over as leader.

After seeing a growing need, Dispenza opened a second group in 2022 that includes international victims of nun abuse, and she will focus her efforts there.

Members of the international cohort are contemplating the launch of nun abuse support groups in Peru and the Balkans. They have put their contact information on the SNAP website, there for anyone looking for stories like their own.

Complete Article HERE!