Anti-gay campaigner guilty of promoting hate at Toronto Pride Parade. Judge rejects ‘purported religious’ motivation - Toronto Star

The messages in Bill Whatcott's flyers went beyond 'merely being offensive,' the judge wrote. 'It is intense and extreme. It is hatred.'

Anti-gay activist Bill Whatcott, seen here in a June 22, 2018, file photo.

After a retrial, a judge has found Bill Whatcott guilty of promoting hatred when he distributed flyers at the Toronto Pride Parade a decade ago, rejecting his “purported religious reasons for his conduct.”

Superior Court Justice Anne Molloy found the message conveyed in the flyers — which describes homosexuality as against natural law and that gay men will face “eternal peril” if they do not repent — goes beyond “distaste, dislike, or merely being offensive. It is intense and extreme. It is hatred,” she wrote in her 42-page decision released Wednesday.

Whatcott, “by his actions, has demonstrated a deep animus towards members of the gay community, notwithstanding his testimony that he wants only to save their souls by having them repent their sins.”

At the conclusion of his first trial in relation to this arrest, Justice Robert Goldstein acquitted Whatcott. The Crown appealed, and the Court of Appeal for Ontario ordered a new trial after ruling the judge was wrong not to hear opinion evidence from an expert on the history of anti-gay discrimination. (Goldstein found the proposed evidence relevant, but not necessary as the history of discrimination against gay men is well known.)