by Julian Mann, Christian Today
Finland has shot itself in the foot after its Supreme Court convicted the country’s former Interior Minister, Päivi Räsänen, and an evangelical Lutheran Bishop for hate speech over a 22-year-old church pamphlet criticising homosexual practice.
There is now a strongly pro-free-speech Republican administration in the US under President Trump. This was not the case in 2021 when the Finnish Prosecutor General charged the Christian Democrat MP and Bishop Juhana Pohjola with “agitation against a minority group”. Then Joe Biden, ushering in a Democrat administration with a penchant for conspiring with tech companies to censor politically-incorrect opinions, had just become US President.
When he was a Senator, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio signed an open letter to the US Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, Rashad Hussain, at the start of the first trial of Räsänen and Pohjola in Helsinki in January 2022.
Five Republican Senators told Hussain: “We are greatly concerned that the use of Finnish law is tantamount to a secular blasphemy law. It could open the door for prosecution of other devout Christians, Muslims, Jews and adherents of other faiths for publicly stating their religious beliefs that may conflict with secular trends.
“We believe that, regardless of whether Finnish prosecutors agree with the religious beliefs that MP Räsänen and Bishop Pohjola have expressed, all people have a fundamental right to the freedoms of religion and speech, which should be upheld without fear of government interference.”
Read also: Finnish Christian MP convicted of ‘crimes against humanity’ for church booklet on marriage, The Christian Institute