‘I’m entitled to my opinions,’ says disqualified UCP candidate Beasley
A candidate for the United Conservative Party nomination in Brooks-Medicine Hat who was disqualified just days before the vote because of anti-Muslim slurs he posted to Facebook says he stands by the comments made more than a year ago.
In the comments in question, made on Facebook in May 2017 under someone else’s post, which contained a link to an article about the Ariana Grande concert attack in Manchester, Todd Beasley referred to Islam as “those who think a rational God would anoint a dark age pedophile warlord as his prophet.” He also called Muslims “fools who are really worshipping Satan.”
A second comment stated Islam “is not a religion of peace,” but rather is “cruel, revolting, racist, oppressive and has no legitimate basis.” The comment goes on to call the Prophet Muhammad a “6th century rapist, pedophile” and a “murdering bigamist, sadistic Warlord posing as a holy man.”
Beasley, a local businessman, said Monday that he defends the essence of his comments.
“Someone was calling for murder and slaughter of innocents and I was extremely upset about that and I make no apology for that,” Beasley said. “I’m not obsessing over Islam, not at all. If you look back through my social media history, I made these posts in that context.”
He said he was speaking for himself at the time, not for anyone else.
“I was angry as heck. Did I maybe go over the line a little bit? Yeah, maybe I did,” Beasley said. “Anybody who paints me as a racist, that’s just ridiculous.”
But Beasley, who was one of three candidates vying for the Brooks-Medicine Hat nomination, along with Michaela Glasgo and Dinah Hiebert, said the cards were stacked against him from the beginning. He said he disclosed the comments to party officials, and that they only became a problem when it was clear he could win the nomination.
“What I’m really upset about is the obfuscation of this whole event when it happened two days before a vote,” Beasley said. “This election was manipulated from the very beginning. The timing of it was basically called in a rush.”
UCP political operations director Jeff Henwood said Beasley mentioned the posts several months ago during conversations with party officials.
“The specific posts, the posts that caused so much concern, were not shared with us,” Henwood said. “He did mention at a high level that he made some comments and deleted them. At the time he raised that, we said, ‘ We don’t know what you said, only you do. If you think it would be problematic, it’s probably problematic. If you don’t, we’ll leave it up to your discretion.’”
Beasley said he still hopes the UCP wins the provincial election, but that he’s disappointed with “some of the people within the party ” for how his disqualification was handled.
“Our forefathers, they fought and died for the right for free speech and I’m entitled to my opinions,” he said.