VANCOUVER, British Columbia, April 26, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) – It’s out of the frying pan and into the fire for Christian crusader Bill Whatcott. Facing a $1.4 million lawsuit for distributing flyers condemning homosexuality at last year’s Gay Pride parade in Toronto, the irrepressible former nurse is speaking out against British Columbia’s first transvestite candidate in the province’s May 9 election.
In the past, Whatcott has won several free speech cases establishing freedom of expression in public places such as university campuses and airports. He has also won a libel case against the CBC.
Whatcott is not a candidate himself. He is simply condemning the candidacy of Ronan Oger, who for the past three years has called himself Morgane. He is the New Democratic Party candidate in the downtown Vancouver-False Creek riding, presenting himself as female. The Vancouver Province and Sun praised Oger as he “makes history” as the province’s first “transgender” candidate. (A Green Party candidate has since emerged with the same claim).
The Sun/Province story relates how Oger immigrated with his father from France at age 15, excelled at high-tech subjects and jobs until settling down to run a tavern in Pender Harbour.
The story gets blurry when recounting how he married and started a family of two with his “partner. ” It does not get into the gender details that his partner was and remains a woman. Also going unreported was what part his decision to attempt a gender change played in his divorce.
Whatcott is not endorsing any other candidate. But he has decided that Oger’s candidacy is a good place to stand up for Christian belief and oppose the so-called “transgender” rights movement.
“Dear Vancouver-False Creek residents,” starts the flyer he began handing out in the riding this week. “I am writing this flyer this election to share my concern about the promotion and growth of homosexuality and transvestitism in British Columbia and how it is obscuring the immutable truth about our God-given gender.”
Whatcott goes on to explain that “Ronan Oger is a biological male who has renamed himself ‘Morgane Oger’ after he embraced a transvestite lifestyle. Ronan is running for the NDP in the Vancouver-False Creek riding and BC's media and the NDP are promoting a false narrative that Ronan is a woman born into a male body.”
Whatcott then contrasts Oger with Walt Heyer, a prominent “de-transitioned” man who now maintains a website called sexchangeregret.com. Heyer, who lived for many years as a female, counsels men and women who believed their psychological problems could be resolved by surgeries and hormones designed to change their gender.
“Walt,” the flyer relates, “repented of his sin, reclaimed his God-given male identity, and is now living as a born-again Christian helping others to avoid the mistake he made of embracing transgender propaganda and trying to live a lie that he was a different gender from the one God made him.
“The truth is there are only two genders, male and female, and they are God given and unchangeable.” People cannot change their gender, the flyer continues. They “can only cross dress and disfigure themselves with surgery and hormones to look like the gender they are not. This practice is harmful and displeasing to God.”
The flyer continues by listing the diseases risked by those practicing homosexual intercourse “such as HIV, syphilis, HPV of the rectum, anal gonorrhea, Hepatitis A,B & C, etc. … Homosexuals and transgenders are also at increased risk of drug and alcohol abuse, suicide, and domestic violence.”
Whatcott’s flyer holds out hope, however: Jesus Christ will forgive those who repent and change their ways. It is a very similar message to the one Whatcott and a small group of supporters dressed in green body suits handed out in pamphlet form at Toronto’s last Gay Pride Parade. This provoked the class action lawsuit from prominent Ontario homosexuals and a court order requiring Whatcott to name all his anonymous collaborators.
Whatcott has not been sued yet in Vancouver, but the reaction has been generally hostile. “Most people are polite, at least,” he told LifeSiteNews, but few, he admits, are supportive. One person called his pamphlet “hate speech” and another called him a “moron.”
Typical of the reaction was Whatcott’s treatment on a popular talk show, Steele and Drex. The hosts interviewed him for 10 minutes but broadcast only a few seconds of his conversation, leaving out, he later told LifeSiteNews, all the medical evidence he had cited about post-surgery transgender people having suicide rates 40 percent higher than the rest of the population.
“That’s fake news what they did. They are the real haters,” he said.
Faced with a provincial election in which Whatcott could support none of the candidates in his own riding of Surrey-Guildford, he went looking for a cause worth embracing. He picked transgenderism because. “I believe it is what God wants me to do.” The LGBT agenda has been allowed to advance to “where it is affecting everybody” including those “who don’t want to take a stand.”
He had belonged to a parish consisting largely of immigrants who tried to avoid political issues such as transgender rights. “Now one parishioner’s daughter claims she is really a man. Nobody knows what to do about it. The family is devastated.”
Nobody can escape the issue, said Whatcott. “People can either go along or take a stand.” He added that the expansion of transgender status and influence seems “irresistible.” “If I weren’t a Christian, I wouldn’t resist,” he said.
The provincial election presents a clear choice for John Hof of United for Life BC. He’ll vote Liberal because several prominent members of the current Liberal government are pro-lifers, especially his own MLA, Environment Minister Mary Pollak, and neighbouring MLA Rich Coleman, the deputy premier.
“The NDP is the antithesis of everything the pro-life movement stands for,” said Hof. “They have been since Day One.”
During their most recent time in government, 1991-2001, they installed “bubble zones” around provincial abortion clinics. Like the federal Liberals, the NDP allows no pro-life candidates.
Polls show the New Democrats are well ahead, and Ronan Oger is leading in his riding. Whoever is elected May 9, said Hof, on May 11 pro-lifers from around British Columbia will assemble on the front lawn of the Legislature in Victoria.
“We’ll be sending the message: ‘Human life matters.’”
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