Rhode Island Supreme Court Rules, That The City Of Providence, Is Able To Force Firefighters To Attend Gay "Pride" Parade

So they think having a fire truck show support for gay pride by driving in the deviant parade is part of the fire fighters work as public servants and equivalent to fighting fires and rescuing people? (this is from the court decision)

The Rhode Island Supreme Court has thrown out lawsuits brought by two Providence firefighters who said their constitutional rights were violated when they were ordered to drive a truck in a gay pride parade despite their religious objections.

The firefighters, Theodore Fabrizio and Stephen Deninno, argued that they are Roman Catholics and therefore do not support or condone homosexuality.

Justice William Robinson, writing for all five members of the high court this month, said the men appeared in the 2001 parade as public servants who were "relatively anonymous." He called it a legitimate work assignment.

"The respondents' appearance in the parade, solely as members of the Providence Fire Department, did not constitute a form of expression on their part. Rather, it was simply the accomplishing of a task assigned to an engine company of the Providence Fire Department, of showing support for gay "pride"" Robinson wrote.

The two lawsuits, filed in 2004, were brought against former Mayor Buddy Cianci and James Rattigan, who was fire chief in 2001. The firefighters sought compensatory and punitive damages for alleged alleged? violations of their freedom of religion and speech.

The court said the men were assigned to work the parade because they served in an engine company that was closest to the parade route. They asked to be reassigned but were refused, according to their lawyer. They said that during and after the parade, they experienced sexual harassment from parade-goers and their co-workers.

From the court decision

A lawyer for the city told the court during arguments in September that the city sent trucks to various parades as a matter of course, including the Columbus Day parade, Purim parade and others. notice this doesn't say chanuka parade maybe because this is no different than what the Greeks did.

After the September hearing, Cianci - who at the time was making an ultimately unsuccessful bid to reclaim the mayor's job he left in 2002 - complained about the glacial pace of the case before the court.

In his opinion, Robinson also made reference to the slow pace of the case, calling it a "jarndycean piece of litigation," an apparent reference to the fictional case Jarndyce v. Jarndyce in the Charles Dickens novel "Bleak House," which drones on for so long and is so complicated that no one alive knows what it means.

(AP) highlight our additions

Cianci was the first mayor of Providence to fly the rainbow flag over city hall and to serve as grand marshal of the gay "pride" parade. In 1997, he was also the first elected official in the state to establish the Office of Gay Liaison within his administration and to appoint members of the city’s LGBTQ community to that position.

(WND)