“A Christian politician in Finland has been convicted of a crime for publishing her views on marriage and sexual ethics 22 years ago,” CBN reports.
“The country’s Supreme Court found parliamentarian Päivi Räsänen guilty of ‘hate speech’ for publishing her biblical beliefs. In a 3–2 decision, the court upheld a criminal conviction against Räsänen and a Lutheran bishop for ‘making and keeping available to the public a text that insults a group.’”
She was fined €1,800.
That is about 2,080 in American dollars.
Paul Jacob has discussed the case in the recent past, in a more hopeful vein. That is, in the apparently vain hope that the highest court of “Suomen Tasavalta” (what Finns call their state) would find this mother of five, grandmother of ten, and wife of a Lutheran pastor innocent of the grotesque charges “of crimes against the humanity of gays and lesbians.”
Oh, that cannot be right. That is from the often-unreliable Wikipedia. The formal charge appears to be “incitement against an ethnic group” (kiihottaminen kansanryhmää vastaan) under Section 10 of Chapter 11 of the Finnish Criminal Code.
The country’s hate speech provision.
How do gays and lesbians constitute an ethnic group? Stay tuned for future updates.
It is noteworthy that not all the charges brought against her came to an ultimate guilty verdict.
What stuck in the court’s craw was that she had written that homosexuality is “a developmental disorder.” The reasoning the court went through to see such a statement as “an incitement to hate” has to be fascinating.
This is especially so after the assurances of Prosecutor General Ari-Pekka Koivisto that the case “is significant because the supreme court went through the fundamental rights assessment in detail.”
