Last updated on December 14th, 2020 at 01:44 pm
Last Thursday it became known that the Prosecutor General of Finland Raja Toivieinen opened the fifth criminal case against the former Minister of the Interior of Finland (2011-2015), the former leader of the Finnish Christian Democrats Party (2004-2015) and the current MP Eduskunta (Finnish Parliament) from this party, Päivi Räsiänen. In three of the five criminal cases, Ms. Ryasyanen has already received an indictment and is awaiting trial.
Päivi Räsianen is a doctor, wife of a Lutheran pastor and mother of five children. She’ll turn 61 this December. What is she charged with? With corruption? In excess of official authority? High treason? Or maybe she, as Minister of the Interior, gave criminal orders to the Finnish police? No, what Päivi Räsianen is accused of is called differently: “hate speech”. Dr. Ryasyanen is not a racist, not a fascist, did not call to kill anyone. Her “crime” is that she… quoted the Bible and called homosexual acts sinful.
Just in case we would like to explain that in those years when Ivy Rässianen was the Minister of Internal Affairs, in Helsinki – as under previous and subsequent governments – every year in the last week of June there was a gay parade, and those who tried to attack the participants were properly detained by the police. The Party of Christian Democrats, led by Rässianen, was only a junior partner in the coalition government and could not have changed the laws in force in Finland, even if it wanted to.
But personally Rässianen did not hide her Christian views – neither before nor after the amendments to the Criminal Code came into force in 2011, which added new articles to the chapter “War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity”. Now, in addition to undoubted crimes such as genocide, killing and rape of civilians in war, use of chemical or biological weapons, torture, etc., crimes against humanity, from the point of view of the Finnish Penal Code, include public “expression of opinion or other communication threatening, defaming or insulting on the basis of race, colour, birth circumstances, national or ethnic origin, religion or faith, sexual orientation or disability”.
The problems of Räsianen started after the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland, to which it belongs, became the official partner of the gay parade in June 2019. Rässianen wrote about it in Facebook, accompanying the news with a picture of the Bible, which was opened on the page with the following words: “Therefore, God handed them over to impurity through the lusts of their hearts for the mutual degradation of their bodies. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie and revered and worshiped the creature rather than the creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. Therefore, God handed them over to degrading passions. Their females exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the males likewise gave up natural relations with females and burned with lust for one another. Males did shameful things with males and thus received in their own persons the due penalty for their perversity.” (Romans 1:24-27) and the question, “How can the faithful foundation of the church, the Bible, be combined with upward display as an object of pride in that which is ashamed and sinful?
After that, a criminal case was brought against Rässianen arose. Subsequently, four more were added to it, connected respectively with her participation in talk shows on radio, television, with the availability on the Internet of her booklet, written in 2004, entitled “Male and female he created them. Homosexual relations challenge the Christian understanding of the human being” (including in the booklet “Homosexual relations are a challenge to the Christian understanding of the human being”). English translation)… And finally, the fifth criminal case opened the other day was a response to a September post on her blog entitled: “The king is naked! Gay pride parade is not a human rights event”.
Päivi Rässianen repeatedly stated that all people, regardless of their sexual orientation, are loved by God and valuable to Him, all are sinners and are called to repent for their sins. What’s threatening, slanderous or insulting about it? The police tried to close the case several times without finding anything criminal in the deputy’s words, but the prosecutor general demanded to continue the investigation.
Rässianen says that she is not afraid of prison (she faces up to two years in prison on each of the five charges against her), but she is not afraid of prison. bother another: “It’s hard to understand what’s going on in my home country now. <…> The more we keep quiet about complex and contentious issues, the more space for freedom of speech and freedom of conscience becomes. If the court finds her guilty, it will mean the beginning of large-scale state censorship, states the deputy. But, she adds, constant criminal charges, pre-trial investigations and interrogations by the police themselves, even without a conviction, in practice limit freedom of speech and conscience.
With this example, we can see that the LGBT movement, representing itself as defenders of minorities and diversity where it has not gained sufficient influence (including in our country), gaining power, becomes intolerant and begins to persecute anyone who disagrees with it. And now in Finland, LGBT activists seek to imprison an elderly doctor and a mother with many children for not considering them human rights activists.