As the misogyny expert witness reads from one execrable “newspaper” article after another, I am distracted by the wedding ring on the defendant’s finger.

Somebody has married this pile of dung.

Who has described women as “tri-orificed chattel”.

Who says rape should rebranded as VIBE — vaginal break and enter.

Who told the irate writer of a letter to the editor, “If I was Jian Ghomeshi, I would think you were coming on to me.”

Who claims a man cannot be held morally responsible for where his “testosterone-laden penis takes him.”

Who joked to another angry correspondent that, hey, just savour those rape-drug-laced martinis prepared by Bill Cosby.

Who alleged that Sophie Grégoire Trudeau belongs to the Satanic Illuminati Court, whatever that is.

Who contends that women, even underage girls, are prone to rape fantasies and that sexual assault trials should more heavily lean toward the presumption of consent when there there’s no evidence of forcible violation: “If the dick fit, you must acquit.”

But perhaps James Sears, the editor of Your Ward News, only wears that wedding band for show. Just as he always uses the honorific “Dr.”, even though he lost his medical licence in the 1990s for sexual misconduct with three women.

Sears and Your Ward News publisher LeRoy St. Germaine are on trial, charged with two counts each of wilfully promoting hatred against two identifiable groups — Jews and women.

Evidence last week was primarily about the anti-Semitism end of things. On Monday, the Crown called Janine Benedet, a law professor at the University of British Columbia, whose scholarly bona fides are focused on the law’s treatment of sexual violence against women.

Read more:

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Benedet did an admirable job of checking her revulsion when she read aloud from articles in Your Ward News, a reprehensible giveaway rag written by Sears, sometimes under the pseudonym Dimitri the Lover. Same handle he used to promote himself on flyers posted around west-end neighbourhoods about Toronto Real Men, described as a pickup artistry business, the world’s “first and only seduction lair.” Oh, and he countered the now international “Slut Walk” — launched several years back to end victim-blaming and slut-shaming — with something called “C--ktease Walk”.

A cock of the walk kind of guy.

Thus we are quite easily able to take the measure of the man, Sears more specifically than St. Germaine, who at 77 is some three decades older and apparently more preoccupied with Jews taking over the world, Jews perpetrating 9/11 and Holocaust denial.

Sears’s impatient exhortation to women performing oral sex: “What are you waiting for? It isn’t going to suck itself.”

The content of Your Ward News is so vile that I will restrain myself from quoting any article at length. But just to get a flavour of ghastly material so hateful towards women, there was the cover illustration from two years ago of then-premier Kathleen Wynne — a lesbian — depicted as a pedophile, with a reference to “butch femme fisting” in front of children. And a link between that and the updated sex-ed curriculum now in limbo.

The free tab — which lands on the doorsteps, unwanted, of some 320,000 residents across southwestern Ontario — laments a “Christian sharia” past when women could be slapped around and slammed into walls for getting uppity. If that’s no longer legally tolerable, Your Ward News blames “Femi-Marxist c--ts,” further claiming that feminists are Satanists exhilarated by abortion as a ritual of child sacrifice.

You cannot make this stuff up. But Sears did.

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Women, you see, by their own behaviour — dressing provocatively, for instance — are actually encouraging men to rape, they want it, with sexual assault charges flippantly dismissed as “speeding tickets on the seduction highway.”

One can scarcely take any of this seriously, which is the problem in prosecuting hate crimes. It all sounds so silly, these broad mischaracterizations and sophomoric tropes. Indeed, that appears to be the main defence which will be advanced — it’s satire. Hence the defendants, but most especially Sears, chuckling and shaking his head in scoffing incredulity, when his published words are read aloud in court. Yuk-yuk. Or yuck-yuck.

Most women, Sears snipped in one trashy article — “Own That Vagina” — aren’t even rapeworthy, because they’re hags and shrews. Presumably not so the woman who pledged him her troth, poor thing.

Sheesh, women should never even have been given the right to vote, Sears fulminates elsewhere.

“Men are presented as being biologically and entitled by nature and divine right to control women, by resistance if necessary,” Benedet concluded of the writings, under direct examination by prosecutor Jamie Klukach.

“Women are reduced to a display of their sexuality. They’re described as chattel, not even human at all.

“Feminists are blamed for distorting the natural order of things.”

In one passage, Sears seems to rely on his medical background to advance the cockamamie theory that few pregnancies actually result from rape. Which, apart from the statistical record, also sloughs off the very real evidence of rape as weaponized tactic in ethnic cleansing, or ethnic cross-pollination by force, where militants deliberately spread their seed far and wide.

Such pseudo-science, Benedet noted, is used by some anti-abortion groups in the U.S. to deny abortions even to rape victims.

Sears, in his articles, repeatedly raises alarms about where society is headed — has already arrived, actually — with promotion of equality between the sexes and destruction of the family. Fight back, he urges men, assert your natural dominance.

“There’s a kind of call to arms,” said Benedet. If women don’t obey, “they can expect to be raped and brought back to that naturally subservient state.”

Oh, and by the way, if you want to hit on a woman — this message directed especially at you, Incel creeps — do it the day after Valentine’s Day. When all those frustrated, dateless, un-romanced, un-heart-you femmes — will be particularly vulnerable and happy to grab at any old cock-a-doodle-do who comes along.

“Valentine vulva,” Sears calls it.

The trial continues, with closing submissions possibly on Friday.