National Review Online
Tuesday, March 31, 2026
Päivi Räsänen is a doctor, a grandmother, and a
long-serving member of Parliament in Finland. She’s a conservative member of
her nation’s Christian Democratic Party. On March 26, the Finnish Supreme Court determined that she is also a
criminal.
She is guilty of writing a pamphlet in 2004 in which she
expressed her views on sexual morality. She wrote that homosexuality was a
developmental disorder. For republishing that pamphlet on her Facebook page in
2019, she has been convicted of “making available to the public a text that
insults a group” and fined 1,800 euros. She was ordered to destroy and
unpublish the offending text.
It was a mixed verdict, however. Räsänen was also
acquitted by the court under hate speech laws for a 2019 post on Twitter/X in
which she criticized her church’s sponsorship of a Pride event, quoting the
book of Romans. This post was what precipitated her entire legal ordeal.
Nevertheless, Räsänen has been convicted under the statutes that handle “War
Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity.”
The split verdict itself shows the incoherence of the
hate speech laws in question. In one instance, the tweet, the court concluded
that the accused was merely using religious language to speak out on a topical
issue. In the case of the pamphlet, a 3–2 majority in the Supreme Court
concluded the opposite. The minister of justice in the Finns Party, Leena Meri,
said that the law was “not sufficiently precise and especially not predictable
as required by the principle of legality in the criminal code.” Indeed, the
case took eleven judges across different courts more than half a decade to
determine this strange boundary between opinion and criminal insult. And nobody
has even tried to describe in pithy, understandable language what the
distinction between the two really is under the law.
If there were still any doubt, the Finnish Supreme Court
has confirmed the charge that Vice President JD Vance laid at Europe’s feet in
his now-infamous Munich Security Conference intervention: Free speech is in
retreat in Europe.
Europe flatters itself that it has moved beyond the
prejudices of Christian civilization and lives by Enlightenment values, where
the definition of dogma no longer drives legal persecution. But of course, when
the highest court is legally criminalizing a biblically informed opinion as
inexpressible and ordering that its publication be stopped, it is acting
precisely in the tradition of book-burning zealotry.
There is no doubt that many groups are insulted, or may
take insult, from the text of the Bible: Canaanites, Amalekites, self-styled
sorcerers, worshippers of Baal. Those of Pharisaical attitude come in for quite
memorable abuse in the New Testament.
The Judeo-Christian religious tradition, which focuses so
relentlessly in the biblical text on cataloguing the faults and sins of its
human characters to demonstrate and vindicate the faithfulness of God, is what
gives Western civilization its astonishing capacity for honest self-criticism,
for carrying on even in the face of all-too-human faults.
Europe is in desperate need of reconnecting with these
religious roots. And one of the best ways of ensuring the possibility of such a
springtime would be to guarantee the freedom of Europeans to say and live by
the Word of God, delivered in the Scriptures that formed European law and
inspired the building of European civilization. The Finnish court has
embarrassed itself in a petty act of authoritarianism.
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