Today’s article includes our Guest Correspondent, Yvonne Aburrow.
TORONTO – Hamilton Ontario is southwest of Toronto and part of the Golden Horseshoe region on the western tip of Lake Ontario. It is important to underscore that Hamilton is part of a densely populated, cosmopolitan area in North America where just over 20% of the population of Canada lives. It is easily one of the most multicultural regions in Canada, if not North America.
On Sunday, September 10, 2023, Hamilton Pagan Pride was celebrating its 20th anniversary at Gage Park. As a testament to their maturity, this year they had almost 80 vendors. They were donating their event profits equally to support Hamilton Foodshare and next year’s HPPD.
Then this happened: Several men, including Pastor Jeffrey Adam Sapocinik, from Grace Missionary Baptist Church, “an Unaffiliated Independent Historic Baptist church standing on the absolute authority of the King James Bible” attended the event.
Sapocinik wrote on Facebook, “The men of Grace Missionary Baptist Church street preaching outside the Pagan Pride Day event in Hamilton’s Gage Park. I don’t know about destroying pagans, but it was no small stir and the Gospel still got out I would also like to give brother David Hammond a special thanks for his professional videography and uploading it to our church’s YouTube channel.”
The Police were called.
Sapocinik was kind enough to post the video of their behavior to YouTube noting that this is how Christians “express a message of love”.
Sapocinik defended his aggression by citing Bible verses on Facebook.
Author Yvonne Aburrow witnessed and reported this account of the incident.
Everyone was enjoying their day at Pagan Pride in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada on Sunday 10th September. The weather was pleasantly cool. Old friends were meeting and chatting. There were eighty vendors, multiple workshops, lovely rituals among the mature trees of the park, and everyone was feeling mellow.
And then suddenly the peace was shattered by a fundamentalist Christian hate preacher with a microphone and a huge speaker at the edge of the park. To begin with he had to compete with the performance of the Dragon Ritual Drummers who were on stage at the centre of the park. They nearly out-drummed him!
The hate preacher was spouting out-of-context Bible verses about sorcery and necromancy and hellfire, with heavy emphasis on bits of the book of Revelations, not to mention badly-translated bits of Leviticus. He also claimed that there are only two genders. I was already riled up by all the other things he said, but that was the last straw. He was also accompanied by several individuals wearing GoPro cameras as body cams, so they were obviously hoping to stir up trouble and incite violence.
Fortunately, someone had the presence of mind to call 911, and the police came fairly quickly and surrounded him, and made him turn off his sound system.
This incident crossed the line between free speech and hate speech in a number of ways: the hate preacher was targeting specific groups (Pagans and LGBTQ2SIA people), and he was using an amplified sound system to disrupt an event that had booked the use of the park.
And here’s a lovely thing to restore your faith in humanity: a Catholic man who was attending Pagan Pride to hang out with his Pagan friends went over to argue with the fundamentalist hate preacher and point out the flaws in his (pre-prepared) hateful rant.
The Catholic guy told me that he was offended by the hate preacher because he was attacking his Pagan friends, and because he was misrepresenting Christianity.
Kudos also goes to the Heathen guy who restrained another Pagan from punching the hate preacher, because — while it was super tempting — they were clearly there to provoke violence so they could claim that they were being “persecuted”.
I’m glad to see that the Hamilton Police Department took this incident seriously enough to send six police cars to sort it out.
And a reminder to everyone that hate speech is illegal in Canada and you don’t have to put up with this sort of thing.
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The Wild Hunt contacted Hamilton Pagan Pride who shared this statement:
Hamilton Pagan Pride Day has been celebrated in Hamilton, ON for over 20 years. It was a wonderful day marred only by four amplified evangelical protestors who appeared shortly after 4:00pm. Police were called to the scene after HPPD committee members determined that the protestors would not voluntarily leave the park. When shared with the protesters that the police were going to be called, they responded, “Go ahead.”
The police were called and HPPD committee members asked all event participants to avoid any physical or verbal confrontation. The police asked the protestors to move onto the sidewalk but after that their hands were tied as the police were concerned about violation of free speech.The police invited HPPD to create a plan with the “Police Community Action Team” for HPPD 2024. This will allow the police to have officers onsite who are familiar and comfortable with handling those who regularly protest at religious events.
We apologize to our wonderful community that these protestors disturbed your day. We can’t express how much we appreciate your patience, that you kept the day running peacefully, danced to the drummers, learned from the presenters and continued to spread your joy! Hamilton’s pagan community is truly amazing and we won’t allow any number of protestors to steal our day or our pride in our religious practices!
Sapocnik enjoyed adding in his video that his sermon “destroys Pagans.”
By all accounts, we’re still here.
About Yvonne Aburrow: Yvonne has been a Pagan since 1985 and a Wiccan since 1991. They have an MA in Contemporary Religions and Spiritualities from Bath Spa University (UK) and moved to Cambridge, Ontario, Canada in May 2018. They have written four books on mythology and folklore. Their most recent books are “Changing Paths” (2023), “Dark Mirror: the inner work of witchcraft” (2020), “The Night Journey: witchcraft as transformation” (2020), and “All acts of love and pleasure: inclusive Wicca” (2014). They blog at Dowsing for Divinity. They are currently working on a new book, “Pagan Roots: Reclaiming concepts of the sacred”.
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