[LINK] "Tories dump candidate who touts therapies to turn gay youth straight"

[rfmcdonald]

The CBC carries Jennifer Ditchburn's Canadian Press article reporting on the Conservatives' dropping a candidate who wrote in favour of anti-gay therapies. This, as noted on Facebook, likely means the riding has been lost for the Tories.

The Conservatives have dumped Jagdish Grewal, a candidate in suburban Toronto who defended therapies that attempt to turn gays straight and who penned an editorial that referred to homosexuality as "unnatural behaviour" and heterosexuals as "normal."

"These comments do not reflect the views of the Conservative Party of Canada. We believe that all Canadians — regardless of race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation — deserve to be treated with respect and dignity," the Conservative Party said in a statement. "Mr. Grewal is no longer an official candidate for the Conservative Party."

Grewal, running in Mississauga-Malton, wrote an editorial in the Punjabi Post earlier this year entitled "Is it wrong for a homosexual to become a normal person?"

He describes an NDP private member's bill passed unanimously in the Ontario legislature in June that removed public funding for services designed to "change or direct the sexual orientation or gender identity of a patient."

Grewal writes in the piece that some psychologists blame a "shock" during childhood for causing a person to become gay, but that the change "can be corrected."