Just before the Christmas holidays, an unassuming single page flyer was delivered to my house.
“Could it be that Santa has finally returned my letters after all these years?” thought I, as I scanned it for cookie crumbs and reindeer tears. Alas, it was not so.
What I had received was not the work of an affable old man, but the work of a simple, resentful man whose list of naughty boys I found unexpectedly long. For myself and about 700 other Saskatoon residents, Christmas had come early.
Writing with all of the graceful allegory of a cockerspaniel, what I found was a flyer entitled “tax funded, pro-homosexual, pro-transgender and pro-drug abuser lunacy!” hand delivered by an Albertan ultra-fundamentalist named Bill Whatcott.
Whatcott also took some time out of his busy schedule to deliver flyers in Regina, Swift Current and Prince Albert, and even made a special trip to our very own university campus.On his website freenorthamerica.ca, Whatcott proudly displayed a picture of one of his flyers mounted on the door of the University of Saskatchewan math department’s head office. Way to pick your battles, Bill.
In Whatcott-ian terms, all gay men — or, pardon me, “sodomites” — are child rapists and drug addicts, while transgendered men are “Guys who cut off their penises and run around in dresses.” Queer City Cinema — a very large gay and lesbian film festival hosted in Regina — is alleged to be pro-pedophile, pro-rape and pro-necrophilia.
At various places in his flyer Whatcott calls for “defunding the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission” and eliminating all “pseudo rights for homosexuals, transgenders and drug addicts.”
And by no means are gay or transgendered men and women Whatcott’s only target. He also distributed flyers in which he called the prophet Muhammad “a man of violence” that came complete with images of a beheaded Indonesian girl, a caricature of Muhammad and an image of Satan torturing Muslims. Oh, and accusations that Islam supports rape and genocide. You guessed it: this isn’t the funny part of the article.
But this part is! Whatcott once made headlines when he sent the Governor-General a parcel of his own poop out of disgust with her behaviour. In between wipes, Bill also made a guest appearance on The Daily Show. For a good laugh, you can find the video online. I don’t want to spoil the surprise, but do you recall the story of how Jesus was thrown into a pit of lions, only to re-emerge the next day totally unscathed? Bill didn’t fare quite so well.
In many ways, dealing with fundamentalist propaganda is a lot like trying to clean a barn with a teaspoon — it’s exhausting and foul and every time you think you’ve dealt with the last pile of shit, another is dropped
off in its place. In order to fully explore Whatcott’s ideas, I decided to create an account on his website under the screen name “Lefty-Losers-Suck.” For the most part, I found little more than spiteful preaching to a flock of like-minded bigots. But imagine their surprise when I dropped the bombshell that I was in fact a drug addicted Muslim-transgendered-NDP-voter!
So long as Whatcott and his herd of like-minded knuckle draggers are confined to their cave in the far right of the zoo, I really couldn’t care how much dung flinging they do. What bothers me is when their rank heap of rhetoric begins to spill out into the better half of society. Isn’t there a point at which enough is enough, a point at which the right to free speech should be considered null and void? Is free speech a defence for hate speech? Is bigotry really worth defending?
If Whatcott were content with being a simple man with profoundly skewed ideas — alone — I wouldn’t feel bad about turning a blind eye. But in 2007 he ran in the municipal election of Edmonton. And far from coming last, 1,665 people felt that a man wearing a sweat stained T-shirt with the slogan “Sodomites Will Not Inherit The Kingdom of Heaven” was fit for the job. Granted, Bill has since been fined nearly $40,000 and is under investigation by the Edmonton Hate Crimes Unit. But when I spoke with him, I was told that he has no plans to pay “a goddamn cent of them kangaroo fines.” I don’t really understand what that means, but it doesn’t sound promising.
While he may represent only a tiny fraction of the extreme right, Whatcott’s positions on these matters are made especially difficult to take seriously because he himself was once a male prostitute (and apparently not a very popular one — he has said that in his former life, most of his time was spent sniffing glue and stealing). I imagine it was in this former profession that he developed his mouthy, hands-on approach. For a good time, call Bill!
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image courtesy of slapupsidethehead.com