Therapy ban will make spiritual counseling a crime in Canada: psychotherapist | News | LifeSite

The ultimate goal is to silence the Christian church in Canada.

TORONTO, Ontario, February 20, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) — The federal bill criminalizing “conversion therapy” in Canada will outlaw praying and spiritual counseling for individuals with unwanted same-sex attraction, a Christian psychotherapist warns.

“The ultimate goal is to silence the Christian church in Canada. It is to silence us from talking. It’s totally totalitarian,” the retired expert in counseling survivors of complex trauma told participants at a Campaign Life Coalition clergy luncheon this week.

“It’s about banning…the central ministry of the church, which is conversion… And it’s about banning the ministry to the brokenhearted,” said Dr. Ann Gillies, author of the 2017 book Closing the Floodgates, an analysis of propaganda promoting the sexual revolution.

Gillies told pastors and priests at the event organized by Canada’s national pro-life, pro-family political lobbying group that she’s speaking out on Bill S-202 because she’s been “impacted by the LGBTQ community for 40 years.”

It began when her first husband “told me he was gay,” she related.

In the 14 years they were together, she was unaware he had “many, many homosexual affairs.” Then her son told her, shortly after she married her current husband, that his father had sexually abused him for more than a decade.

Gillies described the “horrific” and “traumatizing” ordeal of witnessing her ex-husband going to trial, her son testifying for three days, and her ex-husband being acquitted.

He currently lives in Toronto’s “gay” village, where he is “protected by activists” despite being an alleged pedophile, she said.

Her son lived the homosexual life in Toronto for 11 years, then decided to leave. He went through years of therapy, first anger management, then sex addiction therapy, and is now married and the father of four children.

“I would say I have a vested interest in exposing the darkness,” Gillies said. “I feel called to do this.”

Indeed, both Gillies and her son appeared on Sandy Renaldo’s CTV W5 “investigative” piece on so-called conversion therapy in Canada, entitled “Thy Will Be Done,” a program Gillies described as “absolutely biased” and a “direct assault on the church.”

Her son spoke about his life in Toronto’s “gay village” – which was edited out.

“And he talked very clearly about, you know, this was a community and he felt love there and cared for and he enjoyed it. He enjoyed it. And he told Sandy Renaldo, ‘It is the most promiscuous community you could ever find. So it took a long time for me to be free of it,’” Gillies said.

“We need to hear his voice. We need to hear other voices. We need those who have been through …these programs that have helped people to help them, not hurt them, not to harm them, but help them. We need to listen to them. But they need to start speaking out,” she said.

‘A strict agenda to go after the churches’
Renaldo also interviewed Dr. Kristopher Wells, the Canada Research Chair for the Public Understanding of Sexual and Gender Minority Youth at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta.

Wells is “really the chief person driving this bill in Parliament, and going to municipalities,” Gillies said.

The federal bill in question is S-202, introduced by now-retired Senator Serge Joyal, and currently under the direction of Senator René Cormier and at second reading.

S-202 defines “conversion therapy” as:

any practice, treatment or service designed to change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity or to eliminate or reduce sexual attraction or sexual behaviour between persons of the same sex. For greater certainty, this definition does not include a surgical sex change or any related service.

That definition is so broad that if Bill S-202 was passed, pastors could not counsel people against watching homosexual pornography, and 12-step programs such as Courage – which helps Catholic individuals with same-sex attraction live chastely – as well as Protestant “ex-gay” ministries such as Exodus International would “be on the chopping block,” Gillies contended.

But that’s Wells’ express intention, she said. “He has a strict agenda to go after the churches.”

Spiritual counseling and exorcism to be banned

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