The longer Post story is a decent overview of the events leading up to OutVets getting to march in next weekend's St. Patrick's parade.
The shorter story, which got smashed onto the top of that account, is a stereotypical outsider's movie-tinged view of Boston that makes it sound like the entire city of Boston somehow shares in the blame for a small group of bigots (some not even from Boston) who still think it's 1965.
The story begins:
To understand a gay veteran group’s fight to be included in Boston’s annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade, one must understand the parade itself, an inextricable part of the city’s culture and history.
It piles on:
The route famously winds through South Boston, a historically blue-collar, Irish American, conservative neighborhood; if the parade is the backbone of Boston, then “Southie” is at its beating heart.
However, for almost as long as anyone can remember, the parade has become infamous for what it did not include: Gay and lesbian groups had been shut out from marching for decades ...
No, Washington Post, the South Boston parade is not "an inextricable part of the city's culture and history," it is not "the backbone of Boston" and the "Southie" it represents is far, far away from Boston's beating heart or, as the week's events have shown us, from the actual Southie itself.
As anybody who has ever attended the Dorchester Day Parade, where DotOut, Caribbean dances and Vietnam veterans in ARVN uniforms (being actually from Vietnam), can tell you, most of Boston had long ago moved past the mule-headed bigotry displayed on an annual basis by many members of the Allied War Veterans Council, so it's kind of unfair to make it sound like we hadn't or that people living on the other side of Fort Point Channel or I-93 were somehow equally at fault.
Also, and this is a more minor point, but, no, WaPo, Starbucks didn't win the fight to open its first outlet in South Boston last year. There were already several Starbucks outlets in South Boston. What it won was the right to open its first outlet in the City Point half of South Boston. It's an important distinction, at least locally, because that's now what's left of "old" South Boston, as opposed to the yuppie-infused condo-tower area along the waterfront and West Broadway.