Maybe a stupid question but I've never learned much about parity and this sounds like a good opportunity. Can you give some definitions? Are you talking about error checking parity or 'evenness' parity?

I'm guessing the last one since that's what fits your LSB comment(when using 'evenness' not 'oddness'). But in that case I'm not sure your example is doing, my python might be too rusty but is it something like: get the unicode representation(int) of each character in a string, xor the results and get the LSB?