Are we supposed to take David Lametti at his word that C-6 won't target faith leaders?

National Post, 05 December 2020

The justice minister claims the bill does not mean what it says, but refuses to entertain a simple amendment that would put everyone's mind at ease.

Does the federal government think that I should be thrown in jail? The federal justice minister’s answers this past week raises that troubling — to me, if no one else! — possibility.

The Liberal government’s Bill C-6 aims to ban conversion therapy in Canada by making it a criminal offence to coerce an adult into undergoing conversion therapy, to administer it to children or to take them to another country for it, to advertise it or to get paid for providing it. Yet the bill is so broadly and badly worded that it could be used to put parents, teachers, pastors, youth group leaders and others in jail.

The bill makes a fundamental error, described in these pages by Barbara Kay, in equating sexual orientation with gender dysphoria. So the same bill that would ban conversion therapy aimed at a 16-year-old changing his sexual orientation would also ban teachers, pastors or even parents from cautioning a 10-year-old girl that there are likely to be significant negative side effects to undergoing the necessary hormonal and surgical interventions to become a boy.

Justice Minister David Lametti, who’s responsible for the bill, claims that it doesn’t do that. But he refused to entertain any amendments that would make that point clear.

The text of the bill defines conversion therapy as “a practice, treatment or service designed to change a person’s sexual orientation to heterosexual or gender identity to cisgender, or to repress or reduce non-heterosexual attraction or sexual behaviour.”

So if a 17-year-old boy came to me for spiritual direction and said that his social life included rutting with a wide variety of girls, I would exhort him to stop using women as sexual objects. This is fine, according to Bill C-6. But if a boy professed a similarly promiscuous nightlife with other boys, and I gave a similar exhortation to chastity, then I would run afoul of C-6, which makes it a crime to attempt to “reduce non-heterosexual sexual behaviour.” Should I advertise my pastoral counselling as promoting chastity only for heterosexuals in order to comply with C-6?

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