Events

Under political pressure from LGBT mililtants and their enablers, the City of Calgary is planning to ban Conversion Therapy, a beneficial and compassionate therapy designed to help people experiencing unwanted homo-erotic and transsexualist impulses to overcome their fixations. Such a ban, if passed, could have grave implications for religious groups whose moral doctines reject homo-erotic and transsexualist behaviour and practices (see Background below for details). 

On May 13th, the text of the proposed ban will be brought to the Community and Protective Services Committee of the City of Calgary.

We encourage you to contact your Calgary City Councillor and urge them to vote "NO" to any ban on Conversion Therapy.

BACKGROUNDER

Conversion to Christ is at the centre of the Christian life. Repentance, conversion and rebirth in Jesus is the message of the Gospel.

However, there is a movement underway in municipal politics to target the Christian message of conversion through bylaws to ban therapy for unwanted "gender" identity confusion or same-sex attraction. In fact, on February 3, 2020, Calgary City Councillors unanimously passed a motion to draft a bylaw that will ban the practice of conversion therapy within the city boundaries. Now, the bylaw is being developed by staff, and will come back to City Council for discussion and voting in May.

These bylaws, which are making their way across several Alberta municipalities, will inevitably lead to the de-facto criminalization of key Christian teachings on human sexuality.

It is clear to most people following this issue that such a bylaw in Calgary would ban psychologists, psychiatrists, and therapists from providing clinical help to patients who request assistance with unwanted same-sex attraction and gender confusion. 

What’s not understood by most people, however, including some City Councilors, is that even churches who offer prayer to their congregation members to help them exit the LGBT lifestyle would be captured in the broad definition of “conversion” therapy. Ruinous fines or the loss of the church’s business licence could result, depending on the final wording of the bylaw being considered.

Churches in Calgary which run peer support group programs to overcome homo-erotic attraction and other sexual addictions, or to live chastely in accordance with their faith, would be accused of practicing “conversion therapy”, and be subject to the same ruinous penalties which could destroy their church.

Even the act of a pastor evangelizing LGBT-fixated individuals, calling them out of sin and to conversion in Christ, as St. Paul did in 1 Corinthians (Ch. 6 verse 9), could be considered “conversion therapy”, and put their church in legal jeopardy!

So what is conversion therapy, really? In the media, “conversion therapy” is being falsely portrayed as physical and psychological abuse. LGBT activists suggest that patients are being electroshocked against their will in order to forcibly “convert” those who experience homo-erotic attraction into heterosexuals. That is utterly false. It does not happen in 2020, anywhere.

There is a modern, safe, and effective approach to “conversion therapy”, which is more properly called “reparative therapy” by experts in this field, for treating patients with unwanted gender identity confusion or same-sex attraction. Basically, it is traditional psychoanalysis and talk therapy by licensed psychologists and psychiatrists. Their patients go to them voluntarily asking for assistance. They are not coerced or forced. They are not strapped down against their will. They are not electroshocked.  These patients want to recover their heterosexual potential, or to overcome gender confusion. And they should have the right to get the therapy they want! The municipal government has no business prohibiting them from getting the treatment they request.

We still have time to reach out to the individual elected representatives on Calgary City Council and ask them NOT to ban sexual orientation change therapy, counselling, advice, and prayer for those who no longer wish to identify as LGBT.

To make sure no such outrageous bylaws come into force, we need a majority of councillors to vote NO. Contact your City Councillor right here.