LANGLEY, BC-Social conservatives are attempting to adjust to the new climate of uncertainty created by the passage of a law that makes it a crime to say things that could be construed as inciting "hatred" of people based on their sexual orientation.

Bill C-250 received royal assent on April 29, one day after it was passed in the Senate.

"There’s a lot of law-abiding people who are all of a sudden having to be very, very careful about what they say," says Derek Rogusky, Focus on the Family Canada’s vice-president of Family Policy and Community Impact, in Langley, B.C.

"Now you have the risk of criminal sanctions for just simply talking about something like same-sex marriage or the immorality of homosexuality."

The law’s defenders say those fears are baseless, since only those who express the most vile forms of hatred are ever charged with a hate-crime.

"This bill is largely symbolic. I would be the first person to concede that," British Columbia NDP MP Svend Robinson, the bill’s sponsor, told the Senate committee that studied C-250. "There will not be a lot of prosecutions under this legislation."

But Rogusky says the "mean and nasty" responses to the full-page ad that Focus recently placed in newspapers across the country cast doubt on that assurance. All it said was "We believe in Mom and Dad" and "We believe in Marriage."

"People were comparing us with Nazism, equating the ad with bigotry and racism and calling it discriminatory," he says. "Well, this was a very positive message. Imagine the outcry had we taken more of a negative position."

"We feel our every move is being watched very carefully," says Janet Epp Buckingham, director of Law and Public Policy with the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada.

"Pastors are afraid that if somebody comes to their church and is offended by something that they say, they might make a complaint to the police-and on Monday morning they have the police come to their door."

Sean Murphy, western director of the Catholic Civil Rights League, predicts the new law will make more than just Canada’s faith community nervous. "The mere possibility of a prosecution will cause newspaper publishers, among others, to refuse to print material that is critical of homosexual conduct," he says.

Compounding that sense of unease is the vagueness of one of the two laws that C-250 amends-Section 319 of the Criminal Code.

"It is so loosely worded that you don’t know that you’re breaking the law until you’re actually charged," says Brian Rushfeldt, executive director of the Canada Family Action Coalition. "It’s just purely asinine law. Period."

But while no one interviewed doubts that Christians will eventually be charged under this law, there is still no consensus on how best to respond.

Shafer Parker, interim pastor of Sturgeon Valley Baptist Church, in St. Albert, Alberta, is considering asking "multi-thousands" of pastors willing to be arrested to join him in reading the same prepared statement in their churches on the same Sunday.

"Their statement needs to be very biblical, loving and yet clearly stating what homosexuality is, how the Bible condemns it, calling upon homosexuals to repent of their sin and that [the Bible also condemns] a whole range of extramarital sexual activity-promiscuity of every sort," says Parker.

"There has to be a time when an individual is willing to [be like Daniel and] open his window and pray to Jerusalem, even if he’s the only one doing it."

But Buckingham cautions that Parker’s proposal could backfire. "If you’re expressing something in order to provoke a legal challenge," she says, "I’m not sure the courts are going to consider it a ‘good faith expression on a religious subject’"which is the only defence the law allows.

"My advice to the Christian community is: don’t be intimidated, stay the course. If a challenge comes, we need to stand together."

That is likely to occur no later than the fall, when the Supreme Court hears arguments in October on the government’s constitutional reference on a bill allowing homosexuals to marry.