On April 10, 2026, Finland's Supreme Court convicted a sitting member of parliament for writing a pamphlet defending traditional biblical views on homosexuality. The pamphlet was written in 2004. The fine was roughly €1,800. The court also ordered the pamphlet destroyed. If you think that sounds like a clean win for anti-discrimination law, read it again more slowly.
Päivi Räsänen is not a sympathetic figure to everyone. Her views on LGBTQ+ people, drawn from Romans 1:24–27, are ones many people find harmful. I am not here to defend the theology. But the Finnish court convicted her not for organizing harassment, not for targeting individuals, not for incitement to violence. It convicted her for writing a doctrinal argument, then sharing it on social media 15 years later. The same court acquitted her on the 2019 Bible tweet. That inconsistency alone should give anyone pause.
The Line That Actually Matters
There is a real distinction between hate speech and faith-based expression, and it is not that hard to locate if you are willing to look. Hate speech, at its functional core, targets people for who they are and calls for their harm or exclusion. Doctrinal statements, even offensive ones, argue about the nature of sin or divine order. A pamphlet saying homosexuality contradicts scripture is not the same as a post saying gay people should be fired, beaten, or denied housing. Courts that cannot hold that distinction are not protecting vulnerable people. They are expanding state authority over religious thought.
Canada is about to make a version of this mistake. Bill C-63's House passage on March 25, 2026, removes the Criminal Code exemption for good-faith religious expression. Law professor Richard Moon says Bible quotes alone would not meet the hate speech threshold, and I believe him. But removing the exemption means every prosecution becomes a judgment call, and judgment calls favor whoever controls the prosecution. Cardinal Frank Leo warned the Senate about this on April 15. He is right to worry, and he would be right to worry even if he were an imam or a rabbi.
The social media dimension makes this messier. Terrence K. Williams got 160,000 Facebook likes in March claiming Canada's bill criminalizes the Bible. That claim is false, and its virality is its own problem. Misinformation about religious persecution spreads faster than the actual legal text. Platforms that algorithmically reward outrage over accuracy bear some responsibility for that, though I recognize that content moderation at scale is genuinely hard and not a problem any single policy fixes.
Who Should Actually Act
The fair point to the other side: hate speech law exists because harassment campaigns against LGBTQ+ people, often dressed in religious language, cause documented harm. That is real, and dismissing it as censorship is lazy. But the Finnish ruling does not protect anyone from harassment. It punishes a woman for a theological argument she made before the applicable law existed.
Legislators, not platforms, need to write cleaner statutes. The standard should be incitement or targeted harassment, not insult. Canada's Senate should restore the good-faith exemption before the bill passes. Finland's parliament should revisit what its hate speech law actually covers. And critics who want to protect religious minorities from genuine persecution should stop letting bad-faith amplifiers like Williams define the debate, because every viral lie about Bible criminalization makes the real legal threat harder to see clearly.
Räsänen's pamphlet is 22 years old. The court ordered it destroyed. That is not a victory for anyone.
