[8] GLIB sued the Council, the city, and Flynn, and asked the court to compel the Council to allow them to march, citing a Massachusetts law that forbade "discrimination or restriction on account of ... sexual orientation ... relative to the admission of any person to, or treatment in any place of public accommodation, resort or amusement.

[11][12] In an editorial the paper concluded that "Despite Sunday's epithets and excesses, the parade went off relatively well",[13] though its reporter decried the "revisionist history ... of wishful thinkers already trying to claim that aw, the crowd reaction to the gay marchers wasn't that bad".

Judge Zobel again found that GLIB's argument was valid: "The parade is in every rational sense a municipal celebration, a public festival".

While the Council had prohibited certain groups such as the Ku Klux Klan from joining the parade, the trial court believed that these were not significant or germane to the facts presented.

The GLIB contingent of 25 marched that year and met a comparatively less hostile environment that included snowballs and smoke bombs and spitting.

[21][22] The Council appealed the permanent injunction and lost in Superior Court where Judge J. Harold Flannery wrote: "History does not record that St. Patrick limited his ministry to heterosexuals or that General Washington's soldiers were all straight.

[1] When the Court released its written opinion by Chief Justice Paul J. Liacos several weeks later,[24] it reasoned that the law was not overly broad and that it did not unduly infringe upon the Council's First Amendment rights.

It agreed with the trial court's finding that the parade, as it had been run, was subject to the "public accommodations" law and that it did not convey any obvious or specific message.

On January 17, 1995, U.S. District Court Judge Mark L. Wolf ruled that, given that the parade was an exercise of the organizers' free speech, the Council could restrict participation to those who endorsed that political stance.

[28] Because Boston Mayor Tom Menino ordered city employees not to participate in their official capacity, fire engines and mounted police did not march.

Souter interpreted the banner as an attempt to "bear witness to the fact that some Irish are gay, lesbian, or bisexual" who "have as much claim to unqualified social acceptance as heterosexuals and indeed as members of parade units organized around other identifying characteristics".

Legal scholar and gay rights supporter Arthur S. Leonard said that "lobbying and education" were better than litigation as a strategy for promoting gay inclusion, but welcomed the ruling because he thought it was "carefully crafted" to the issues raised by the parade "while at the same time upholding the authority of the state to ban sexual-orientation discrimination.