The feel-good version of this story goes as follows: Bible-toting Christians preach hate outside house of Leslieville gay couple. Outraged neighbours confront the bigots. The bigots leave. Tolerance wins.

The confrontation occurred Sunday evening on Highfield Rd. Some of it was captured on camera by one of the outraged neighbours. He posted 90 seconds of footage on YouTube. The tidy morality play rocketed around the web on Monday and Tuesday.

The problem: its viral success has upset not only the alleged homophobes but the alleged victims of their homophobia, one of whom is now defending the people widely accused of tormenting them and questioning the actions of their supposed defenders.

“I don’t like how the whole issue is being distorted,” said Blair Chiasson, a civil servant who lives with his partner, Paul Collins. “Nothing happened. Nothing happened.”

He added: “I just want this to stop. Stop discussing it. Stop talking about it. It’s really kind of spiralling out of control.”

The dispute, during which a neighbour called police, involved parishioners from Highfield Road Gospel Hall, a nondenominational church of about 30.

Christine Oddy was on her porch when she heard a sermon which featured, she said, “something about blood running down the street, souls going to purgatory.” She approached the parishioners. “You are hateful people, that’s what you are,” she can be heard saying on the video.

Online, hundreds of others joined her in condemnation. Prominent U.S. sex writer Dan Savage, who is gay, called the parishioners “Christofascists.” Another gay blogger called them “Christian terrorists.”

To Chiasson, however, they are the unthreatening “church people” — and they did not do anything wrong.

Chiasson, 45, said he believes Highfield parishioners only choose to read the Bible from a spot near their house because a fire hydrant prevents cars from parking there.

He said the parishioners preached on the street long before he and Collins, 47, arrived 13 years ago. Moreover, he said, he and Collins have never felt personally targeted by the parishioners, have never heard them say anything homophobic, and have not even been present for three years on the summer Sundays when the infrequent sermons occur.

He said the parishioners are “a part of the neighbourhood” with the right to speak freely. The neighbours who confronted them, he said, “overreacted.”

“We don’t even know the people that started this,” he said. “So the people who are apparently our defenders, we don’t even know who they are.”

Prominent among them was Geoffrey Skelding, 29. Skelding, who is also gay, filmed the confrontation and uploaded it to YouTube with the title “Neighbourhood comes together and kicks out religious haters.”

Skelding, who moved to the street in January, said he did not personally hear any of the parishioners’ words and did not know whether they had said anything homophobic.

But he said he found it unlikely the parishioners would preach outside the house merely by chance. And he said his primary concern was that the parishioners had “essentially taken the neighbourhood hostage” by loudly preaching within earshot of people who had no desire to listen.

“I don’t know 100 per cent if it was targeted at the couple. I don’t think that that’s the issue anymore,” he said. “I think it’s turned into, ‘You know what, I don’t think you need to be spreading whatever message you have the way you did on my street.’ ”

Asked about the Internet response to the video, most of which has assumed the parishioners were homophobic, he said: “Unfortunately the Internet is its own animal, and I can’t control it. I just took a video of what happened, and the Internet did the rest.”

Jane Farrow, executive director of Jane’s Walk and a Highfield resident, said neighbours have told her the parishioners have also preached outside the home of a lesbian couple on nearby Kerr Rd. She and Skelding both said they knew of heterosexual neighbours whom aggressive door-knocking parishioners have called sinners for living with partners outside of marriage.

“It goes beyond spreading the word of God. It’s righteous, it’s rude, it’s bigoted — and there’s no room for it on Highfield,” Farrow said.

Parishioner Levy Okinga, who was present Sunday, said his group never targets specific homes. “We don’t really know who lives where,” he said. “If there are cars parked on the road, we don’t go there. We go where there are no vehicles.”

He said “there was no inflammatory and no targeted message at all” on Sunday, merely “a message of God’s love.”

Another parishioner present, 77-year-old Esther Gordon, also said members of the group — in which only men do the preaching — did not say anything homophobic.

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But Gordon added: “Our preachers do preach about sin. There are no specific sins mentioned, but if somebody’s conscience bothered them . . . maybe the Lord’s speaking to their conscience.”

Okinga said the parishioners would “obviously” not return to the same spot.

“We are not for confrontation,” he said. “We understand that people have the right to express their opinions. If we’re talking about tolerance, it’s both ways. If there is an issue, the best thing to do is sit down and talk about it.”