Thousands of pastors across North America preached from the pulpit the Sunday before yesterday, many responding to MacArthur's organizing, to object to Canada's law banning conversion therapy. One of the strictest bans legislated anywhere, much stricter than U.S. state level bans, which are mostly only symbolic because they exempt religious counseling.

Since Christians are just about the only people in North America who practice or encourage conversion therapy, exempting so-called "pastoral counseling" has meant that states that have banned conversion therapy have not seen a drop in the practice of conversion therapy. In some cases, numbers have actually risen rather than declined.

This is what Canada wanted to avoid, and they have done a fabulous job passing a tight law that criminalizes Christian counselors just as it does secular counselors.

Following MacArthur's lead, Christian leaders across North America are now calling the ban a criminalization of Christianity itself.

But is it?

The very Sunday that MacArthur and thousands of pastors were railing against that law, a mother whose daughter killed herself because of Christian conversion therapy took to the pages of the National Catholic Reporter to tell her family story and to ask clerics to back off, to stay out of gender and sexuality issues that they are not trained or qualified to be part of. She was writing from a Catholic perspective, because conversion therapy among Catholics is soaring in the United States despite a belief that Catholics don't do conversion therapy. That might have been true in the past but it's not true anymore.

I wrote about her daughter, Alana Chen, who killed herself on her second attempt. The first time she planned to commit suicide, an intervention took place and she was hospitalized. Afterwards, nuns and priests continued to teach her that she was “defiled” and “impure,” that she had to rid herself of same-sex attraction in order to qualify for taking communion or becoming a nun.

The counseling she received was conversion therapy by every practical definition possible. That sort of counseling is supposed to be illegal in Colorado, but the law does not apply to Christian counselors.

It should.

Banning "pastoral" conversion therapy no more criminalizes Christianity than banning other dangerous practices, like withholding medical care from children, popular with some Christians.

You can't pray children to health if they have bacterial pneumonia or diabetes, and you can't pray the gay away. When you try, people die.

Canada recognizes that fact, and now if Canadians try to encourage kids to pray the gay away, they're going to risk prison. I hope Christians in Canada get the message loud and clear, but if they don't, I hope Canadian officials enforce the law vigorously. If nuns and priests try in Canada what they did with Alana in Colorado, I hope they land in prison.