I think he's seriously downplaying how awful the public canings are, but you're seriously downplaying how awful conversion therapy is.

It's like

    bad|-----caning------conversion_therapy-----|good

and you're making it sound like

    bad|-----caning----------conversion_therapy-|good

Which is total bullshit. Voluntary courses and meetings, my ass.

If you think that conversion therapy is voluntary in most cases, you're delusional.

There's a lot of outside pressure involved and often, you don't really have a chance but to give into that until you can leave your whole family and existing social infrastructure behind.

I think it's pointless to view it as some sort of competition of awfulness, but you should know that the worst of the conversion therapy places were way more evil than this jaunty characterization. Some of them were using their own invented version of "electro shock therapy" that functionally was just torturing kids.

Even the more mild places do things to kids that leads to life long mental health challenges. It shouldn't be trivialized away as all just being a friendly chat among consenting adults.

Shunning [1] can be devastating and is used as a powerful alternative to physical punishment in pacifist communities like Anabaptists (e.g. Mennonites and Amish). Shunning is like a chronic disease while caning is acute.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shunning

People have the right to decide who they associate with. Communities and organizations have a right to decide who they allow into them.

Shunning is very effective in enforcing community standards and behavior. It is one of the fundamental mechanisms inherent to any and all communities. At your job you can get fired. If you contribute to a dev project you must abide the CoC, and if you're a member of some cult or some community like Amish you have to live by community standards or you can go live by whatever standards you want with people that want to live that way with you. It can be devastating, but it is not wrong.