Finland imposes “harsh limitations on freedom of expression”, the Washington Post notes:
Päivi Räsänen, a member of the Finnish parliament, has just been acquitted for posting a Bible verse on social media in 2019, but she was convicted for publishing a pamphlet in 2004. That she was prosecuted for either is the real crime.
She is a conservative Christian. Räsänen believes homosexuality is sinful. In the 2004 pamphlet, she called it a developmental disorder. The Finnish supreme court ruled that this is a crime. Because her statement was judged incorrect, she was found guilty of “making and keeping available to the public a text that insults a group.”
The court acknowledged that her writing did not incite violence or hatred while still finding her guilty.
In the 2019 social media post, Räsänen quoted a Bible verse to support her belief that the church of which she was a part should not participate in Pride Month events. The prosecutor said to the court that citing the Bible is allowed, but “it is Räsänen’s interpretation and opinion about the Bible verses that are criminal.”…she was acquitted of all charges by two lower courts. The Finnish government appealed those rulings, dragging out the case for years to finally secure this one conviction, for which Räsänen is fined 1,800 euros.
Räsänen is now considering appealing to the European Court of Human Rights. This is a case where the process is the punishment.
Räsänen’s co-defendant in the case is a Lutheran bishop, Juhana Pohjola, who published the pamphlet. He is also chairman of the International Lutheran Council, a global association of denominations that includes the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, the second-largest Lutheran denomination in the United States.
“This court decision is a defeat not only for us and those who adhere to traditional Christian teaching,” he said, “but also for those who think differently, because the issue of freedom of speech and religion is common to all.”
If Finland is able to do this to a sitting member of its legislature and a clergyman who chairs an international organization with millions of members, no less notable person can feel comfortable expressing similar views in public.
It’s tempting for Americans to look at this travesty and think it couldn’t happen here. But Finland’s constitution says everyone has both freedom of expression and religion. Maintaining a culture of free speech is as important, maybe more so, than any words on a page.
There is currently no exception to the First Amendment for speech that insults or demeans a group. As the Supreme Court explained in Matal v. Tam (2017), “Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate.’”
There is good reason not to allow the government to ban what it views as “hate speech.” Bans on “hate speech” often end up punishing commonplace views and speech not motivated by hate.
Many people, including medical experts, could be punished for “hate speech”, if America’s courts let our government impose bans on hate speech. In 2019, Twitter applied its “rules against hateful conduct” to briefly ban an psychiatric expert for stating in passing that transsexualism is a mental disorder. Twitter did that even though the “bible of psychiatry,” the DSM-5, indicated at the time that transsexualism is a disorder, and the expert chaired the group that worked on that section of the DSM-5. So an expert sharing his opinion was deemed hate speech.
In the United States, progressives have defined both facts and conservative opinions as “hate speech” and “disinformation.” For example, the taxpayer-funded Global Disinformation Index classified a factually-accurate blog post by a black lawyer as “white supremacy content” and “disinformation” because it pointed out that the black crime rate is higher than the crime rate for other races. That factually-accurate blog post was characterized as white supremacist even though the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics has confirmed that the black crime rate is higher. Rates of committing homicide “for blacks were more than 7 times higher than the rates for whites” between 1976 and 2005, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics in its publication, Homicide Trends in the United States. As the BJS noted in a later version of that same publication, Homicide Trends in the United States, “Blacks are disproportionately represented as both homicide victims and offenders….The offending rate for blacks (34.4 per 100,000) was almost 8 times higher than the rate for whites (4.5 per 100,000).
In 2022, Facebook classified as “hate speech” the statement by Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn that “Biological women have no place in women’s sports.”
Progressives have claimed that commonplace views about racial or sexual subjects are “hate speech.” That includes criticizing feminism, affirmative action, homosexuality, or gay marriage, and various opinions about how to address sexual harassment or alleged racism in the criminal justice system.
