by Daisy Mae Inglese, Restoring the West
The Finnish Supreme Court has wrongly equated peaceful Christian expression with hate speech, undermining the distinction between deeply held belief and genuine incitement to harm.
Responding to:
Finland’s Supreme Court ruling against a parliamentarian for a 22-year-old church pamphlet.
The core disagreement: The Supreme Court of Finland has wrongly determined that the Christian teaching regarding sexuality constitutes hate speech; I contend it is protected, peaceful expression.
Päivi Räsänen, a Finnish MP since 1995 and former Minister, faced criminal charges after a 2019 post that questioned her church’s support for an LGBT event and quoted Romans 1:24–27. Prosecuted under Finland’s “agitation against a minority group” law, she was acquitted in 2022 and 2023. However, the Finnish Supreme Court accepted the prosecutor’s appeal against both rulings and, in a 3–2 decision on March 26, found her guilty on one charge linked to a church pamphlet on marriage and sexuality.
WHERE THEY GO WRONG
The central flaw in this prosecution is a form of moral blindness: the inability to distinguish between peaceful religious expression and genuine hate speech. Räsänen’s statements were rooted in longstanding Christian doctrine, not incitement or hostility. Both lower courts recognized this, issuing unanimous acquittals and explicitly finding no basis in the evidence to alter their judgments. The charges centered on a 2004 church pamphlet, a 2019 radio discussion, and a Bible quotation—none of which incite harm or violence. The repeated appeals indicate a shift from justice to signaling, where expressing orthodox religious beliefs is reframed as inherently harmful.
This case must also be understood within a broader European trend. The European Commission is pushing to make “hate speech” an EU-level crime—placing it alongside terrorism and human trafficking—raising serious proportionality concerns. According to Office for National Statistics and European Parliament data, 190 people have died from terrorism in the UK since 2006 and 374 across the EU between 2014-2019 in acts involving brutal premeditated violence and trauma. Can we really compare the two? One brings harrowing consequences—families losing loved ones without a goodbye and others left with lifelong debilitating conditions. The other? A tweet that, at worst, hurt someone’s feelings. Conflating them dilutes serious crimes and risks restricting freedom of expression and religious liberty.
