This Sunday, much of Boston will head to Southie for the St. Patrick’s Day parade. But amid the drinking and the music, there’s a legacy of exclusion that continues to hang over the event.

In 1994, the Boston St. Patrick’s Day parade was canceled after the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that the group that organized it, the Allied War Veterans Council, was not allowed to exclude LGBT groups from joining. The Council opted not to have a parade that year, rather than face the idea that Bostonians of all sexual orientations be allowed to participate.

Lucky for the Council and enemies of equal rights everywhere, over the next year, the case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the organizers were free to exclude said groups, based on the reasoning that “that a parade was a form of expression in which the government may not interfere, even for the ‘enlightened’ purpose of preventing discrimination.” Perhaps the right legal decision, but in my view a real blow to Boston.

And so the parade went on, as did the discrimination.

Fast forward to today and nothing has changed. It’s 2013, and yet the St. Patrick’s Day parade, a centerpiece of Boston culture, continues to exclude LGBT groups. Instead, there’s now a second parade organized by Veterans for Peace that starts right after the first parade, following the same route. And the best the City of Boston can do, apparently, is hold off on sweeping the streets until after the second parade finishes, so as not to give the impression that it’s time to go home after the first one.

The irony, of course, is that Massachusetts was the first state to legalize gay marriage a full eight years ago. And yet this kind of exclusion is still tolerated.

To their credit, Mayor Tom Menino and two Senate candidates have refused to join this year’s parade. Interestingly enough, it was Menino’s first year in office that the parade was cancelled, according to The New York Times:

Mayor Thomas M. Menino, who last November broke a string of Irish-American mayoral victories and became this city’s first Italian-American mayor, said today that he was unable to persuade any other group to sponsor the parade on such short notice.

Unfortunately, nearly two decades later it’s the same organization sponsoring the event.

Perhaps the most depressing thing about all of this is that most of the parade-goers this weekend will likely have no idea that the event they’re watching is organized by a discriminatory institution that has gone to great lengths to avoid moderating its stance. The parade is one of Boston’s marquee annual events, but it should also be a source of our collective shame.