“A person who makes available to the public... ...information, an expression of opinion or another message where a certain group is threatened, defamed or insulted on the basis of its race, skin colour, birth status, national or ethnic origin, religion or belief, sexual orientation or disability or a comparable basis...”.

How is Prosecutor General claiming, that expression of religious doctrine is criminal, wouldn't be against Criminal Code? This is a clear cut case of expressing an opinion, which threatens and defames a group, based on their religion. Replace Christianity with any other religion in this situation, and they'd be up in arms, calling for apology and retraction. Mulsims in UK schools case, certainly weren't just taking it, for which I respect them. Why with Christians, it is always "Please, believe me, I'm not a bigot" and never "How dare you defame and threaten me, because of my beliefs!" Well, Doctor Räsänen seems to be of the latter kind, but that she isn't getting mass support from her community is shameful.

The ironic thing is that liberals used to be in favor of expressing opinions! This was enshrined in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19.

Then Herbert Marcuse cam along with the doctrine of Repressive Tolerance: Liberals favor tolerance at first but when they gain power witch and start repressing Christian Conseevatives

It's another sad sad reminder.
California's informal Empire of Degeneracy has imposed its sick culture throughout the areas formerly occupied by Western Civilisation.
The only resistance comes now from places that view marxism and the American secular-liberal elites* as an alien hostile force (e.g., the South, and parts of Middle America; Poland, Romania, Russia, etc.).
(* "elites" - latin for well-groomed white trash)

Seems to me that the problem is that there's a Church Act to start with, inviting the government to veer out of its lane and into religious affairs. Finland is the one country where an Orthodox Church is required by law the celebrated on the Western date. Even the Bolshevils didn't do that. If a government can legislate that it it can legislate what the Bible means. Ugh! Separation of Church and State, folks - it's your friend.

Separation of church and state defied the basis for government authority to rule over a Christian population, so the anabaptists were persecuted unto death for defying that authority based on the universal infant baptism it required, claiming such baptisms of no effect. Both Catholics and Protestant churches and authorities participated in their torture and murder. Anabaptism was the reclamation of Jesus' refusal to establish worldly kingdoms, and it was anathema to the European systems of governance then and thus all those nations had official churches.

How absurd to think that it matters to God, or to moral rightness, whether a baby is baptized or not. Another “vital doctrinal debate” that is so arbitrary and pointless that both sides are embarassing themselves.

But of course everyone should be free to express whatever religious, political, and social views they want, without government interference or pressure of any kind. The people who use government to suppress Christianity and intimidate Christians, must be stopped or none of us can be free and safe.

How absurd it is to think that the opinion of a person in the 21st century matters more than what Scripture says, and 2000 years of faithful Christian practice of baptism.

What are they required to celebrate on the Western date?

Sorry, Easter (We Orhodox often use the Greek word instead of the paganistic English name)

It's not about word choice. The word just wasn't there. Probably a glitch somewhere.

"Separation of Church and State, folks - it's your friend."

Funny, though, how State keeps moving over and giving Church less room, despite the "separation."

Orthodoxy in Finland must surely be one of the worst possible examples of "church and state!!!" given the historical and geopolitical context, including what the Russian Orthodox Church is even today willing to see done to Protestants by an autocratic state acting on its behalf, as recently discussed here. (Western converts who think this is non-normative or a sign of "corruption" are kidding themselves to an astonishing degree.)

Right. The Finnish law is likely an anti-Russian measure dating back to Finland''s independence and reinforced by the a Soviet invasion in WWII. It still shows a government that can't stay in its lane.

No it's not. I'm not sure how the idea that the FOC's differing date of celebration for Easter relies on law came to be. It's true the date was originally moved at least partly in an effort to curry favor with the new Finnish government in a difficult time, but there's nothing, legally or otherwise speaking, that would prevent the FOC to moving to the same schedule for Easter as the rest of the Orthodox world, should it so choose.

When homosexuals tell you "don't worry this won't affect you" they are lying. It has and it will. They will not leave you alone no matter what you do. They fully intend to persecute us and do every chance they get.

It's called forced conversion!

Yes it is, so stop with the polemics and join us in fighting it. "We fight together or hang separately" in this matter.

You're right. Just ask Jack Phillips in Colorado and the Christian bakers in Oregon who were slapped with $135,000 lawsuit.

Rod, let's get to the heart of the matter. Who lobbied Finland's government to legalize these anti-free speech hate laws? Who were the groups, group leaders, individuals, and financiers? And other Western nations. As traditional-minded Christians we deserve to know who our persecutors are by name. A list of names. For instance, in America one of the organizations would possibly be the SPLC. And, I learned in TAC recently that the Washington Post ran at least one article favoring the curtailment of First Amendment rights. That rag is owned by Jeff Bezos, so there is another name. But I wonder if people are afraid to compile a list like that because, I estimate, a majority of the financiers and activists would have something in common too taboo to mention.

Why do you imagine some vast Western conspiracy is likely or required for Finland to make the laws it has? Finland has no First Amendment to curtail. It has also been, if anything, ahead of the curve in social and legal acceptance of LGBT rights relative to the United States. Finns are perfectly capable of lobbying for their own laws.

Chris, this is a dead end.

Read Anne Applebaum to see that what you suggest does not hold water. What's in common here is the rejection of God, period. Such people are at odds with their own identities, they are not faithful to themselves. They represent themselves only.

I fully believe that the state should not punish anti-LBGT expression. It would help if those who oppose whatever LBGT-friendly pubic policy would explain how others will be harmed by them. To most of us, bathroom bills and restricting marriage to hetero-sex couples just seems queer if not malicious.

We're here, we're queer and we're in your face?

There's no need to punish anti-LGBT ideas. They fail on their own merit in a free market of ideas.

Assumes facts not in evidence. Also, you failed to define your terms.

The facts are these: LGBT Americans in the span of half a century went from being the most reviled and criminalized caste in the country to nearly total victory in legal rights and societal acceptance.

They did this without ever once having the power of government to silence their opponents with criminal sanction. In fact they secured their victory in the fact of a legal regime which for many years criminalized their very existence and denied them livelihoods in most professions.

For all the breathless talk of gulags, no American faces the remotest possibility of arrest for criticizing gays or for saying outright hateful things about or to them. I am glad for many reasons that someone like Paivi Rasanen could not be detained or charged for her views here.

One of those reasons is that there's simply no need to ever employ such power against her. We won, and we won on the merits of our case, not by using government to crush the other side. Nothing helped our case so much as letting our opponents talk and revealing in full who they are and what they stand for.

Persecuting Rasanen is not only toxic to democracy but totally counterproductive. It creates a martyrs aura for someone whose ideas otherwise have no currency among most Finns. By speaking freely, Rasanen has done more to advance LGBT acceptance than arguably many of the movement's own. After she spoke her piece in a televised 2010 debate, nearly 40,000 people left the national church, largely inspired by what she had to say. My advice to Finnish gay advocates is don't jail or fine or even legally censure this woman. Give her her own prime time talk show....

You must be male.

"Explain how you and others will be harmed by this LGBT stuff or we will throw you in jail for opposing LGBT stuff."

Look, in all seriousness, the people pushing the rapid expansion of LGBT queering of everything aren't looking for explanations. They aren't listening to the ones that have been offered since pre-Obergefell (even as those arguments have become more prescient each day).

If you cannot see that this is about pure, distilled power politics—the ultimate endpoint of postmodernism culminating in another giant intersectionalist hammer used to smash the world—then you simply aren't paying attention. The quality of argumentation isn't what's at play here, so I see no point in offering the umpteenth rehash of why a functional society should preserve traditional structures that create stability and provide balance between the timeless and immutable realities of the sexes.

This is one thousand percent true. Andrea Long Chu, the male-to-female transsexual, also told the truth when he said in his NYT op-ed that he expected to be just as miserable after his sex change surgery as he was before it, but improving life wasn't the point; the point was to exercise the will, unfettered by anything.

Interesting. According to the most recent Human Freedom Index, Finland ranks number 5 in the world in terms of "Personal Freedom" (as opposed to "Economic Freedom"). And yet freedom of speech - about the most basic personal freedom - in Finland seems to be under threat.

I woder what the devine authority known as Human Freedom Index has to say about countries like Russia, Venezuela, Syria, Bolivia. Scratch that last one.

All these "Freedom™" Rankings are the most Anglosphere NGO-governmenal-academic-military complex things ever. All these do is score and rank countries based on whether they tick certain pre-defined checkboxes that have been determined by the complex's groupthink to be things one needs to comply with in order to be pro-"Freedom™". The reality of NGO operations is that they are deeply complicit in the promotion of neoliberal globohomo, and all their rankings operationalize is how much a country is on board with the neoliberal take on the issue in question. It is a way for capital to seed the idea that countries that sovereignly choose to disengage from globohomo are deviant and deserving of an American liberty intervention 'cause look at their Freedom and Puppies and Sunshine Rankings!

Neoliberalism has often naively been characterised as a retreat of the state, but the historical evidence has proven that it is really a selective retreat combined with a selective re-assertion of state power. So on the one hand you get unconditional lip service to the notion of total human freedom, yet on the other hand the state (e.g. the criminal justice system) and its ideological apparatuses (schools, public broadcasters, everyone who receives any kind of subsidy from the government) intervene to make sure the newly liberated (neoliberalized) individuals hold the correct opinions and feel the correct feels in regards to the issues as defined by the morality of neoliberals. Nordic countries are quite homogeneous and have efficient political systems, so they are able to maximize their laws and institutions for scoring well on all these ranking and receiving plaudits from the institutions of neoliberal globohomo. Especially the press and academia (notice that when American media talks about Sweden, Denmark or Finland, the coverage is 5% about the reality of those countries and 95% is liberal fantasies about what America should and could become if it weren't for those dastardly Republicans, Christians, and deplorables obstructing progress). What you see in Finland now is a country that has so efficiently maximized for the state being a promoter and enforcer of the neoliberal imperative to divorce sexuality from biology that it may have run afoul of the European Convention of Human Rights, which is the main enforceable legal instrument guaranteeing civil liberties among Council of Europe member states (all of geographical Europe in the broadest sense, minus Belarus).

So why aren't our Orthodox clergy in Finland also being attacked for "hate speech"? Aren't they articulating the Faith?

Rod, Rod. This is isn't persecution, it's "just the natural consequence of holding to a minority viewpoint in a culture that rejects that viewpoint." (eyeroll)

A few years ago, opinions were published in The Mennonite, the official journal of Mennonite Church USA, that expressed the hope that one day soon, people with our opinions about traditional marriage and sin will be imprisoned for our beliefs. Then, a doxxing and purge by radicals started, which they excused by claiming that defending historical Christian morals represented an assault on women, causing them to fear for their lives.

In none of this was objective truth important, only total victory by crushing dissent through personal destruction. They admitted following Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, which permit any means as long as effective.

Later on, the The Mennonite published articles claiming that conservative Christians were the real murderers behind the homosexual Islamicist's slaughter at the Pulse Night Club. They claimed the drug and sex hookup facility was "our most sacred space." After the mass murder by a domestic and foreign Islamicist at the San Bernadino government office, they published articles by Christian Peacemaker Teams that "all violence is White." Officials in Canada, including politicians, called for outright banning of the Bible, "a hate document unacceptable in a modern, multicultural state."

On our recent sojourn to our Indian Reservation, outside social workers have been agitating for teaching the residents' children how to engage in perverse acts against indigenous culture, falsely claiming native culture has always embraced a "two spirits" celebration of transgenderism and homosexuality. Nothing could be further from the truth, but the bald lie is fearlessly asserted and propagated by the Canadian government, which administers The Indian Act in that country, making people fear retaliation should they speak out.

I haven't seen those articles but I do know that the Membership Guidelines, which prohibit pastors from performing same-sex marriage ceremonies, is under review for possible changes.

You haven't seen them because Fran invented them.

In Luke's Sermon on the Plain, Jesus said: "But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be given to you." (6:36-38, NRSV)
These are the immortal words of Jesus that help soften my stony heart when I am faced with words and deeds by others that I find offensive. When I meditate on these words, they melt my judgements (to which I am so very prone). I become able to see the pain that makes them say and do what offended me.

At all the hinges of the historical evolution of human society there have been Christians on both sides. On the issue of slavery, Christians who prioritized Jesus acted for abolition whereas the arguments of those Christians for slavery prioritized Paul. So it is with the human rights of LGBT people. Those who deny them human rights quote Paul and those who work for justice and mercy quote Jesus.

If you perceive LGBT people as the enemy, Jesus asks that you love them, do good to them, expecting nothing in return. When you read Rod's constant attacks on LGBTQ people and are tempted to feel validated, remember to prioritize Jesus. Read his words, pray for compassion, be merciful, and you will be a child of the Most High.

OK liberal.

Really? OK dreher. The snarkman cometh. :)

This pitting of Christ against St. Paul was neatly demolished by C.S. Lewis nearly a century ago. It is a cherished liberal fantasy.

Of course. In my recent experience, Baptists and Pentecostals pray that the church would love people who feel same sex attraction even as it affirms what purpose God intends sexuality and marriage to serve. One does not preclude the other.

The Catholic catechism says this:

The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfill God's will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord's Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition.

I wonder if the same thoughts would be extended to "racists" or hardcore Trump supporters.

Somehow I doubt it.

Good sermon. What rights are they being denied, pray tell? No sarc, just would like to know.

"On the issue of slavery, Christians who prioritized Jesus acted for abolition whereas the arguments of those Christians for slavery prioritized Paul."

Please. That's an utterly laughable oversimplification. See Noll's The Civil War as Theological Crisis.

No Christian perceives so called homosexuals as the enemy. They simply follow the Law of God and condemn sodomy. People are always free to ignore the word of God. What is unjust is forcing God fearing people to celebrate ignoring the Word of God. That’s perverse.

I haven't had a chance to get back to you over on Mere Orthodoxy, but reading this comment of yours again confirms you are just a fraud that hates Christians while claiming to be one. You clearly enjoy lying about us, slandering us, and hoping we end up punished for simply keeping the authentic faith and rejecting your corrupt version.

We are indeed forbidden from hating you in return, but we are not forbidden from calling you out. I hope you come to your senses before it's too late.

For someone who is not hating hoosier_bob, you really do a great job at concealing it.

And, btw, hoosier_bob is one of the most thoughtful commenters at Mere Orthodoxy, and it’s a pity that their hosts refuse to engage with him.