A Secular Blasphemy TrialA Christian Finnish member of Parliament is prosecuted for “hate speech."
By Sean Nelson
February 3, 2022
A Christian woman sends out a tweet criticizing the practices of a state-sanctioned religious body. The woman includes a picture of some Bible verses to bolster her point. A politically motivated prosecutor launches an investigation and combs through years of the woman’s public writings and statements, finally bringing charges against the woman for “ethnic agitation.” The charges come with a potential penalty of two years in prison for her allegedly offensive speech and dissent. The woman also happens to be a high-profile opposition politician.
Where did this occur? You might say in the Middle East or North Africa, where Christians and members of other religious minority groups are regularly arrested and imprisoned simply for wishing to speak freely and share the tenets of their faith with others. Places where dissident political figures are often silenced by the government.
But in this case, you’d be wrong. Instead, the woman in this example is Päivi Räsänen, a longtime member of Parliament in Finland. In 2019, she tweeted a criticism of her own church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland (ELCF), for its sponsorship of a pride parade, along with a picture of a verse from the Letter to the Romans. The ELCF was previously the established church of Finland and is still considered a national church. Räsänen’s tweet was in accordance with the church’s traditional teachings on human sexuality, although that teaching has recently been the subject of intense debate.
This simple tweet started a legal odyssey for Räsänen. Despite police having found her tweet perfectly legal, the Finnish prosecutor general dug up soundbites taken out of an hour-long radio interview, and a 17-year-old pamphlet Räsänen had written for her church, and brought charges against Räsänen and her publisher, Juhana Pohjola, who is now a Lutheran bishop. Their trial began last week on January 24.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/a-secular-blasphemy-trial/
