Free Republic

Paivi Rasanen must make God laugh. The 27-year member of Finland’s Parliament on trial for tweeting a Bible verse confounds so many pagan slogans. She’s a mother of five children and grandmother of 10 who didn’t need abortion to simultaneously pull off two demanding careers: medicine and politics. An empathetic woman who eagerly shows pictures of grandbabies on her phone and expresses concern for strangers’ travel plans, Paivi (pie-EE-vee) also refuses to subjugate her reason to emotional manipulation. She holds fast to Christian teachings about sex as reserved exclusively for lifelong marriage between one man and one woman, for which...

(CP) Finnish lawmaker Päivi Räsänen, prosecuted for voicing her traditional Christian beliefs about marriage and sexuality, believes that a "heavy hatred for Christian values" in Western society will cause many Christians to censor themselves for social acceptance. The former interior minister who has served in Finnish Parliament for nearly three decades was one of several global political figures to speak at the annual International Religious Freedom Summit in Washington, D.C., this week. The event aims to increase "the public awareness and political strength for the international religious freedom movement. The summit is led by former Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom...

Paivi Rasanen, a medical doctor and MP for a small Christian-democratic party since 1995, called homosexuality "a developmental disorder" in an online opinion letter published in 2004 and "a shame and a sin" on Twitter in 2019, the prosecutor said. In a programme broadcast by Finnish public radio station Yle in 2019, Rasanen described homosexuality as a form of "genetic degeneration", the prosecutor added, charging her with three counts of agitation against gay people. In her 2004 opinion piece, Rasanen claimed that scientific evidence proved undeniably that homosexuality was a disorder in a person's psychosexual development and she suggested that...